Hungry Hungry Hippo

The last time I went to a zoo in India was a few years ago when I toured the cages of scurvy ridden animals in both New Delhi and Jaipur. Elsewhere in the world you take your children to zoos to show off the wonders of the animal kingdom and enrich their understanding of biodiversity and evolution. Indian zoos seem to have a slightly different purpose--they warn of the horrors of the Russian gulag and educate children on how fortunate they are to have been born humans. I once saw a brown bear in a cage barely larger than my dining room table--and a hyena with so many sores on it that it resembled the mage ridden mutts outside it's cage. But my opinion is beginning to change.

Yesterday afternoon my wife and I dropped by Anna Zoo 30 kilometers south of Chennai and we were shocked by how well maintained the facilities were and how much space the animals were given. There was a whole menagerie of happy looking critters, and since we're in the tropics, most of them were in the proper habitat (unlike the Elephant housed up in the zoo in Anchorage Alaska).

The highlight was a rather hungry pigmy hippo that wouldn't stop showing off his spectacular dental hygiene. I think he even posed deliberately for the camera on a few occasions. I'll tell you, you haven't lived until you've seen the inside of a hippo's maw.

E-governance: Futurism or Feudalism?

E-governance initiatives across India are aimed at simplifying the country's incomprehensible patchwork of laws and bureaucracy into one simple program that can be sorted and searched with all the ease of Google. Yet some scholars charge that the program's slick exterior cloaks feudal impulses.

Take Bangalore's Bhoomi project for example. The project codifies hundreds of different forms of land tenure into a single database so that the central government can issue legal deeds to prospective buyers. Anyone who has ever tried to look into real estate in India knows that land claims are a big headache, and one small mistake can mean that you forfeit your entire investment because of multiple valid claims on a single plot of land. The problems usually arise when one person owned a plot of land a hundred years ago and, on death, dispersed it to his/her relatives until there is no clear title. Over the years different children quibble over who owns what piece and often times the issues are never resolved. While the land stays in the family it is no problem, but when someone wants to sell it to, say, a multi-national company, the big bucks involved can lead to tense situations. Well-intentioned people in the government compiled Bhoomi so that land claims could be verified and to encourage investment.

The way it works is that a person with a valid claim can show up at any Bhoomi kiosk, declare he owns the land (showing documents helps) and then upload his information to the system. The kiosks use biodata--fingerprints, eye scans, or some other such thing, to verify that person's identity. While that is all well and good, problems come from two ends.

There are two problems with this.

First. Since most claims are contested to begin with, there is a lot of pressure on the terminal level to make a decision on who the ultimate owner of a particular parcel is. Families fight over it and there have been several instances of local goons and the so-called "land mafia" getting involved to strong-arm their ways into a deed. Violence and land struggles are nothing new, but now when mobsters take over a Bhoomi terminal they control the legal infastructure as well.

Second. Once the deeds have been categorized, it becomes very easy for the government to use new eminent domain processes to usurp the land and dole it out investors. The people who can't resolve their disputes over valid titles are often pushed off their parcel by police waving lathis or construction company vigilantes.

Solly Benjamin, a well-known scholar in Banglaore, has been writing about the Bhoomi project for several years, and I had the chance to meet him for coffee a few months ago. He drove me around town in his ancient Padmini Fiat and showed me several plots of land that were fenced off by the government to be sold, and yet had dozens of families living on them.

He says that the Bangaloreans who predated the IT boom don't have access to the city's new found wealth. Lack of cash means they are steadily being pushed into the outskirts. But the city is expanding rapidly and a new IT corridor to the West of the city is coming up and more and more people are being pushed into slums and other cities. Rather than help poor people keep track of their land and secure their place in the government by registering on the internet, the Bhoomi project is instead accelerating their removal.

Contested land claims make it difficult to buy and sell land. That is a blessing in disguise for many of the city's poor. Sure they can't make money off the real-estate, but at least they can keep a roof over their heads. The Bhoomi project isn't so much a boon, as a way to reinforce a new feudalism.

Targeting the Indian Space Research Organization

In the wake of the Mumbai and Varanasii bomb blasts, intelligence leaks in the Navy war room and last December's shootings at IISc Bangalore, the Indian Space Research Organization has begun to ramp up security. For those of you who don't know, I have had an ongoing fascination with ISRO since I heard about the Chandryaan-1 mission to the moon, and have a couple stories coming out about it in Wired in the coming weeks/months.

In my visit to Sriharikota, the launch site for all of India's satellite launch vehicles, and to the satellite research center in Bangalore the two things that struck me were the bureocratic walls of red tape that I had to cut through to get interviews with scientists as a foreign journalst, and the actuall fortified walls of the complex that were bristling with police officers holding assault rifles.

Although there have been no attempts by terrorists to target ISRO to date, it is without a doubt one of the most important repositries of national pride in India.

So I was not surprised this morning when I read a small blurb burried inside the pages of the Hindu that a stranger was picked up near ISRO's Liquid Propulsion System's Center (LPSC) at Panagudi. The story only said that the man was being interrogated--a procedure in India that makes Guantanamo look like Club Med. What it did say was that K. Sivan (45), a West Bengal native, "was posing as a rag picker" and wandering near the compound wall.

In all likelyhood the man didn't even know that ISRO had a facility there, and has no connections to terrorist groups--but there is some nagging doubt.

Murder and the Call Center

If by love we mean stabbing a woman 35 times until she's dead, then people in India love too much. The Hindu reported this morning that on Tuesday evening two young call center employees, a man and a woman, shared a car home. The man, Kishore, professed that he was "madly in love" with her, but that she needed to mend her "high-lifestyle ways". Aparently the girl, Tania, was friends with other men, and Kishore wanted her all to himself.

So he killed her.

He stabbed his "love" until she was little more than a bloody pulp and then disposed of her body in a river. He tried covering his tracks by sending out SMS messages to her friends saying she was living for Bengal, but the police soon caught on and arrested him on Thursday.

A murder is a murder is a murder, right, why write about it? People kill each other over love all the time, why is what happened in Bangalore any different? The scary thing is that it isn't unusual at all. With so little outlet for socializing with the opposite sex at a young age, people across this country tend to obsess over first person that they have any chance at romance with. If the romance doesn't work out--the least stable of the lot tends to resort to violence.

The violence takes many forms--sometimes making a mere stabbing look like the warm embrace of progressive politics. Besides revenge gang rapes, shootings and burnings, it is getting increasingly common to use acid to get back at an offending woman.

But don't take my word for it. Do a Google search on "acid attack girl India" or check here for a recent story in the Deccan Chronicle of a woman who spurned a man's advances and was doused head to toe by an acid thrower. She died only a couple days later.

While India is pushing forward in technology and business at a steady clip, there is a wide gap between the economic modernization and positive changes in gender roles. Tania, the murdered girl, was accused of having "high-lifestyle ways" and talking with other men, but Kishore couldn't take it. Though they both worked at the same call center--the symbol of modern India--he couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that new economic roles for women mean that they have to occupy a different social position as well. She probably wanted to hang out with friends, drink coffee at local stalls, peruse the glossy shops on Brigade Road and perhaps, if she was really "modern" try a sip of alcohol once and again. She was working for money, and probably wanted to spend it in the same ways that men are allowed to.

Kishore, and a lot of men like him, can't accept these changes. Though there was no indication in the article that they were actually in a romantic relationship, he probably wanted her to be a stay at home kind of woman who worked and then brought money back to her family for her father to spend for her. One day, if they had ended up marrying one another, he would expect her check to go to him.

These sorts of stories have shown up in newspapers for years. Love murders aren't one time events, but social problems that need to be tackled. For every person who flies into a murderous rage over "high-lifesyles", how many men don't go that far, but only beat the woman, or call her derogatory names, or fly off the handle enough to make her miserable? My guess is that it is a lot more than you think.

Tuning into Chennai Traffic

Three weeks ago I flew to Kuala Lampur to extend my Indian visa. I was staying with someone I met online and spent several days walking through the city, checking out upscale malls and marveling at the public transportation. Then, over a deeply fried fish in Chinatown, my host sipped a bit of herbal tea and proceeded to tell me why traffic in Kuala Lampur was so bad.

"There are just too many cars--and there are a lot of people who learned to drive in the village and didn't improve once they got to the city," he said.

I was shocked. Not only does Kuala Lampur have extremely well designed roads, but, for the most part, people obey traffic laws. No one runs red lights, there are very few potholes and police have cracked down on drunk driving. Occasionally, during rush hour, people have to sit in their cars for a while, but the jams begin to clear up quickly.

It is normal to complain about the traffic in your city as there is no place on earth where occasional road backups don't mangle your plans. Kuala Lampur is no exception. But when I began to tell my host the traffic situation here in Chennai, I think he came away with a
little better appreciation for his civic infrastructure.

As far as I can tell there are no laws--or at least no one seems to be familiar with them. Run red lights, travel on the wrong side of the road, run down a pedestrian, go slow in a passing lane, don't use a lane at all, cut someone off just to stop in front of them--if you are driving in India it really doesn't matter what you do to get to your final destination.

Every morning before I jump on my motorcycle I wonder if this might be the last time I ever drive. No one wears a helmet, and I see at least one crash a week. Not long ago I was in Pondicherry and I helped move two dying men from the road who had crashed into one another while angry onlookers honked their horns and wondered what was causing the delay. At least three motorcyclists barged their way through the standstill and came dangerously close to running over the prone bodies on their way past. When traffic did start to flow agai I was sure that there were at least a few dirty looks cast my way and I wiped blood from my hands and waited for an ambulance.

Sharing the road with everything from bicycles and rickshaws to motorcycles, buses, camels and cows innumerably extends the sorts of accidents that you can get caught up in. Every day the Deccan Chronicle gives short listings of fatal accidents that usually involve gruesome details of people run over by buses after falling from motorcycles, burned alive when they hit live wires, falling into unseen trenches, and decapitations from un-helmeted people slamming
into the backs of lories.

On the roads the only rule that has any meaning is "might makes right": the bigger you are the more freedom you have to do anything you want. I find it crazy that under Indian traffic law, if you cause a fatal accident, you can usually get off with a fine of only Rs 1500. I know at least one person, who completely at fault, killed someone and was free to continue driving as early as the next day.

I can think of at least a few solutions that might make the problem easier. First, the police need to be empowered to stop, ticket and tow any violators. While there are hundreds of police on the road directing traffic right now, none of them have radios, handcuffs, or even books of tickets to distribute. When a lawbreaker gets directed to the side of the road, more often then not they just speed past and the cop is powerless to do anything about it.

Second, the police need some sort of incentive to actually do their job. Since most traffic cops make something like rs 700 a month (!), it might be a good idea to give the officers rs 10 every time they stop and ticket someone. Not only would it drive up revenues for road improvements, but also the police would have strong motivation to start doing their job. After only a couple of months you would begin to see huge changes in the way that people approach driving.

Mainstreaming the Morning After Pill

Sure India has a reputation for being a little squeamish when it comes to frank discussions of sex, but that's not to say that the country can't be pragmatic when it needs to be. Last year after only a half hearted attack by assorted Hindu fundamentalist segments, the Ministry of Health gave the go ahead order to allow emergency contraception to be sold over the counter. One year later generic pharmaceutical companies like Banglaore based Intra-Labs have upped the ante with a broad based ad campaign to market the drug. It's a breath of fresh air after living in Madison, WI for three years where Christian fundamentalists have attempted to ban sales of the pill several times, and empowered pharmacists to opt-out of distributing emergency contraception--in at least one case, even to a rape victim.

Arranged Marriage and Divorce

Salon's advice monger, Carry Tennis, published a letter this morning from an Indian woman in an arranged marriage who has begun to have second thoughts.

The woman, a 29 year old veteran of only three relationships, went through the normal arranged marriage rigmarole, interviewed, Googled, swapped horoscopes and generally checked out her prospective groom before finally taking her seven steps around a sacred fire and moving briefly to the United States. Three months later, after her first fight the couple separated and she moved away--back to India, presumably. Now she wants a divorce.

Carry Tennis, in a great feat of multi-cultural deference, did what many American writers do when dishing advice to people from cultures they scarcely understand. He differed on the side of caution and told the woman to start pumping out children, making money and generally moving on with her life. After all, she was an Indian and had to stick to tradition. It was a bit of safe advice that completely misses the mark--and certainly doesn't address the woman's situation. Rather, he assumes that India is a conservative society and the more she rocks the boat the more trouble she will be in. Boat rocking is best left to Americans.

Divorce happens. It even happens in India. No one should be an advocate for pre-emptive divorce, but so many people find themselves chained into relationships that they can't escape and place a higher value on a bout of temporary social turmoil than they do on a lifetime of unhappiness.

Arranged marriages can work. But just like love marriages, they can fall apart, too.

Tennis probably didn't see was that this woman was writing to Salon precisely because she wanted advice from a foreigner. While Americans generally assume that India is stuck in the backwaters of tradition, many Indians assume that Americans are so caught up in being "modern" that they will divorce at the drop of a hat. Most likely she wrote to Tennis so that she could find someone who would give her some impetus to move forward with a divorce and pursue her heart instead.

Tennis should have given her some support.

Meenakshi Blesses the Internet

It was only a matter of time before the goddess Meenakshi descended from her lofty perch and began to distribute her blessings over the World Wide Web. The Meenakshi temple in Madurai is one of the most sacred sites for Hindus yet not everyone is able to make a pilgrimage into central Tamil Nadu to be blessed by the goddess.

The answer came when the CEO of Winways, Mr. R Sivarajah teamed up with the temple staff and created a website where members can put in advanced requests for temple priests to say prayers for special occasions, birthdays or anniversaries. For an additional fee prasadam, eatable sugar coated blessings, can be mailed anywhere in the globe.

The website offers bookings up to 90 days in advance and services range from 300 rupees to 3180 ($6-$75).

This isn't the first time this temple has made a foray into electronic media. Several months ago I made my way to the temple with my family and I saw at least one kiosk with a computer loaded with information about the temple.

Missing Passports and Ignorant Police

A few days ago I left my passport on my desk after consulting it for some information. Not thinking much of it I left it there and went about my daily routine, and then this afternoon I noticed it was missing. My wife and I spent the better part of three hours combing every nook and cranny of my apartment, but our search came up empty. Realizing that there was a chance that it would never turn up again, I drove down to the American embassy to report it missing.

After talking with the officer there she told me that I couldn't apply for a new passport without a police report and directed me towards the nearest police station. So begins the tale of my trips to seven different police stations--each time an officer directed me to another office. While I am pretty used to the ol' Indian bureaucratic rigmarole, I've never had been shuttled about quite so much as I was today. I went to Nungabakam, Annanagar, Roipetta, Kilpauk and Kilpauk-6, each time they said they couldn't issue me a report because, well, it just looked like they didn't want to.

Finally, in the police station closest to my home they had me hand write a report that was pretty much the first paragraph of this entry and then smiled and laughed at me.

"Passports don't just disappear, it had to be stolen," said K. Sridhar Babu, an officer with several stars adorning his shoulders. Then he said, "It must have been your Indian wife, if nobody else was in the house it had to be her."

Then he said something in Tamil that brought the rest of the attendant officers into a chortle.

Since the station is only a few blocks from my house they must have seen me driving around town occasionally with my wife on the back of my motorcycle. She is also an American, but of Indian descent.

But what does my wife have to do with my missing passport?

For the next twenty minutes I pleaded with them to stamp the handwritten report they asked me to write out, but they just shook their heads and told me to come back some other day. Then the all began to laugh at me again.

So now I am back here at home wondering what it takes to file a police report. Without it I have no way to apply for a new passport, and stand an outside chance of being deported.

Anyone with advice about where I should proceed to from here, I am all ears.


**** ADDENDUM 2 HOURS LATER*****

There was a solution after all. My wife has a few connections in the government and after a short series of phone calls they began to listen. The police actually called me and asked me to report to the local police station so they could process my report.

When I arrived the officers had not yet been informed, and starred at me in the same surly manner as before. The only sign of progress was that they ushered me to the "crime bureau" where I sat down in front of yet another man to explain my story.

He looked at me with dead eyes, yawned and said that I should come back in six days and maybe they would have time to talk to me then. As far as I could see the man had been simply biding his time in his office--not exactly in the middle of an important case.

But then my phone rang again, and the person on the other end said that a high-ranking officer was on his way. Apparently my wife's connection is pretty good. On hearing the name of the incoming officer, the man in front of me transformed. He brought me into yet another room and immediately began processing the report. All he had to do was photocopy and stamp the piece of paper I had written out long hand earlier that day, but hey, it is all I needed, anyway.

So why does it take so much effort just to file a report? Was it sheer laziness, or was it that they needed an outlet to express their authority?

If I didn't have connections would that mean I would have been out of luck? What about all the people in this world who actually need the police to...gasp...help them when they are in trouble. Would someone who was raped have to wait six days to file a report? Would a drunk driver not be charged until he had over a week to sober up? This incident just doesn't sit right with me.

Hoodwinked by Court TV

It was the perfect revenge story. In a blog that started only two months ago, a woman named Emily went from being happily married to discovereing that her "perfect" husband had been cheating on her with her best friend. Over the next couple weeks she decided to do everything in her power to extract her revenge. She put up a billboard with a note to her soon-to-be ex and destroyed his beloved stuffed animals. It was a great read--I even contacted her to possibly write a story about it--but then I began getting the feeling that perhaps the whole thing was a hoax.

It turns out that it is part of a viral marketing campaign by Court TV to promote some new TV show about divorce court. It read a little too much like Sex in the City to be true, but I have to admit that I taken in at first. The notorious bilboards were sighted in both LA and New York.

I am not sure if I am angry at the lie, or if somewhere inside I am sort of impressed.

All the Sultan's Rockets

As Hezbollah and Israel trade rockets in a military conflict that is sure to claim a thousand lives, India is celebrating the first military rockets ever made. In 1792, the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, unleashed the first rocket barrage on invading British troops and sent them into flight. The British were so startled by the attack--no one had ever dreamed of rockets before then--that during their rout soldiers picked up unexploded projectiles and sent them back to Britain for some good old fashioned intellectual property theft. A few years later the British returned with their own rocket corps and left the sultanate in ruins.

Over the weekend The Deccan Chronicle, the Hindu and Hindustan Times covered Abdul Kalam's (the President of India) to Mysore and claimed that those rockets were the inspiration for all missles to come.

"This was the beginning of the rocket technology and the contribution of the ruler and his men is unforgettable. How the original idea came to his mind is amazing. Our rocket and missile technology is actually based on the same principle," he explained in an article in The Hindustan Times

Though the first rockets were fireworks produced in China, Kalam and the DoRD (Department of Research and Defense) want the world to know that they are ultimately responsible for some of the most murderous technology produced to date.

I'm not sure why it is so important to visit this particular point in India's past right now--is it perhaps some sort of endorsement of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah where some of the world's most advanced rocket technology pinpoints and destroys vast tracks of Lebanon while the Hezbollah responds with rockets only slightly better than what Tipu Sultan came up with two hundred years ago?

Or, is it more along the lines of good old fashioned Hindu fundamentalism where pundits and faux-scholars like N.S. Rajaram proclaim that India produced the first nuclear weapons five thousand years ago?

Sepia Mutiny also has a thing or two to say about it.

Pitching from the Trenches

There is a lot more to being a writer than simply stringing words and sentences together. The secret to writing for professional markets--the sort of markets where you could conceivably drop your day job and pay your way through life by tapping stories out on your keyboard--isn't only developing a strong command of the English language, it's learning that writing is a business. In order to write for the big markets you need to realize that some of the most widely read writers aren't the necessarily the best writers, they're merely the one's who have developed the best relationships with editors and successfully marketed their work. They're the one's who have perfected the art of pitching.

There are a number of websites devoted to helping freelancers break into paying markets. Writers Weekly and Absolute Write are good places to start learning about the trade. But these websites don't always emphasize how important pitching is.

On a day-to-day basis, I spend more time talking to editors about the stories that I could write than I do actually writing and researching stories that I have already been assigned. Many people think that when you are working for a magazine or newspaper you walk around in the world, happen upon a cool story idea, immediately write it up and publish it. Unfortunately, my experience is that it is the exact opposite.

Assuming that you have an idea, the first step to any published piece is writing up a short evocative "pitch" that explains to an editor the sort of story you want to write. It can vary in length from a couple sentences to a thousand words but needs to include what the story is about, why it is a good fit for their publication, how long it should be, and why you are the best person to write it.

If the editor you are contacting doesn't know you, the pitch has to be a work of art in itself to even stand a chance of being noticed. The first time I ever wrote for Wired News the editor got back to me and said something to the effect of "We could almost run this as a story. You just need a few quotes."

My first attempt at being a freelancer in 2000 I used to write about 300 pitches for every one that was accepted. Now I'm about 1 in 3.

But even with one in three the chances that any particular pitch eventually winds up into a magazine is still too slim to spend a lot of time researching the topic. When I am writing a story I usually have to interview about a dozen sources, go to one or two locations and revise the piece several times. Every story requires a lot of energy, and when you aren't sure it will make it to publication, pitching is the only way to go.

So when writing the pitch you need to tell the editor what you are likely to encounter when you actually report on the subject. Often times you have heard a contact talk about a topic, or read something in a newspaper that you think you can expand on. There is also a ton of great background information that you can pick up on wikipedia and google. Don't worry too much about getting every fact correct on the pitch; you will have time to perfect it in the story itself.

It can take anywhere from a few minutes to a couple weeks for an editor to get back to you. In that time there is almost nothing to do but wait since giving the editor a bunch of updates is almost sure to turn him or her off to the story.

In the coming weeks I will include some links to some pitches I've written that have been successful, and to a few that I though should have made it, but didn't.

In the mean time I am still pitching from the trenches. It's Saturday afternoon and I just had an idea. There is no time to waste.

Where Have All the Saris Gone?

A hundred years ago everyone in India wore local dress. In the North men still wore kurta pajamas and in the South there were dotis a-pleanty. Now it's all trousers and button down shirts. Traditional clothes began to dissappear when the British arrived on their "civilizing mission", and though not complete, I have a feeling that within a generation almost no one wil wear traditional clothing.

A couple days ago I read an article in the Deccan Chronicle that for "world ethnic day" women at Anna College donned saris in school. Photographers swarmed the place for a rare glimpse of a well-educated young woman in a sari. For the most part women in Chennai wear trendy salwar suits with flowing scarves or, now more frequently, tanktops and blue jeans. People here seem to think that saris, while becoming, are indicative of a traditional way of thinking that is now quite unfashionable. They're linked to arranged marriage, staying home, obeying husbands, and spending one's life brewing tea for unceasing streams of guests. Most women I meet these days want to avoid those things like the plague.

Western clothing means modern womanhood. Tanktops mean freedom.

I am completely supportive of people dressing the way they want to, but it is somewhat sad that most women I meet will only wear saris on their wedding days or formal occasions when they want to prove that they are indeed Indian.

Farewell to the Blog Ban

For a little while there I thought this blogging project would never get off the ground. I fiddled with my FTP settings for a few good hours before I began to question whether I was just a useless rube who was just learning about the tubes of the Internet.

I don't think it helped that I was trying to set it up while blogs were banned in India. It could have been that my last 100 attempts to post were simply blocked by people trying to curb hate-blogs.

Until I figure out who to design my own blog with Wordspace or some other such software, I'm going to use Blogger. Sorry. I know it's not very slick, but it was all I could do to even begin posting.

6 months chasing technology

It has been six months and 19 days since I moved to India and seven months to day that I was married in a bar in Madison, WI. We live in a two bedroom apartment on the north side of Chennai with a clear view of a stagnant pond of mosquito infested water, a traffic signal and the best cheap eatery I have ever had the opprotunity to try. It has been almost a year since I dropped all ambitions to pursue my Ph.D. in anthropoloy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a more uncertain life as a freelance writer. So far I am happy with decision. I've had some success writing for some well known magazines, and I hope to use this space as a sort of idea dump where I log some of the stories that I would like to pursue, but don't have time to do so. I'll also probably drop in the text of a few stories I've written once they've been published.

There is always a bit of danger composing a blog if you are a writer, and I am still wondering if I am going to regret this later. I have this pained feeling that if I say too much here some of my ideas might find their ways into other writer's stories before I get a chance to publish them myself. It's a risk that I am willing to take. It might also mean the death of this medium for me.

So what is it that I do? I'm a freelance writer working for about a dozen different magazines and newspapers across the US. Lately I've seemed to find a home with magazines that deal with technology and I've been published in Wired Magazine, Wired News, and the UK-based .Net since I moved here. It is a bit of a jump from what interested me in the past since I am by no means a technology guru. Instead I'm trying to look at the places where technology and culture clash and what happens afterwards.

I'm writing about a week after several bombs exploded in Bombay, and there is a good chance that this post will never make it online since the Indian Department of Telecommunications has deemed fit to suspend blogs that it deemed a security risk. Aparently they were unwilling to come up with criteria for acessing risk, and instead of cutting off LTTE and Laksar-e-toiba message centers, that have eliminated thousands of blogspot and blogger accounts. There have been protests. My protest is pressing the save button on this and hoping it makes it though.