Recording Has to Become the Norm

I think it’s obvious to anyone that a lot of our problems are caused by those who’re supposed to help alleviate them. Cops not only do nothing, they actively subvert the course of justice. It’s not as if they don’t know that what they are doing is wrong – they’re fully aware. If any of them knew that a person was recording them, they would not have allowed it or they would have modified their behavior. They can only work in darkness. Transparency is a death blow to corruption and dereliction of duty.

I’m pretty excited over a technology like Google Glass. While many are worried that it’ll invade our privacy, I’m keen to see how it will be used to record public officials taking bribes and generally being uncooperative. I’m a strong proponent of privacy, but government servants have no expectation of it when doing their job. If only every bureaucrat acted as if a camera was pointed at them in their interactions with people, I guarantee you that corruption affecting our daily lives would vanish overnight.

Already I hope that recent exposés will make the police more wary about what they say and how they treat those who come to them for help. You never know when someone will be recording and your words made public. I wish there was a way to have cameras recording everything that happens in police stations with a backup of two days. But it’s impractical and will only cause them to accept money outside or take other evasive manuevers.

What we need is for the traditional “sting” operation to become so commonplace that officials start assuming by default that their actions could be shown to the whole world. Prejudice, bias, incompetence and callousness can only flourish in darkness and secrecy. What we need is the disinfectant of light to clear it out. It will vanish like snow before the onslaught of the sun. We need every person to carry around a sun with them. Little globes of light poking and prodding everywhere so that darkness can never feel safe.

It’s not as if public officials don’t know what is right and wrong. The policewomen who locked up that little girl knew full well what they were doing. They would never have dared had they known that it would become public knowledge. So if you’re thinking of cutting them some slack because they “didn’t know”, don’t. They knew. And they deserve to be shamed and punished. When the technology becomes available, use it everywhere. When you get your passport renewed. When you get your vehicle license. And then put those videos on the web.

It’s time to show India its true face without distortions.

Fighting for Women’s Rights

The first reason of course is that it goes against my basic sense of fairness. Poverty and hunger while big issues are not really anyone’s fault. They’re the result of macro environmental factors such as the economy, population, job availability, food prices, agricultural production and so forth. So not really fixable or immediately avoidable.

Human rights issues on the other hand are fully within our power to solve today. We can’t wish away poverty by a mere act of will no matter how hard the entire country focuses its efforts on doing so. But deciding that women have the right to live their lives as they please? Deciding to treat homosexuals equally? Not blaming the victim for the crimes perpetrated on her person? These are our problems, not the environment’s. Their resolution is solely up to us. There is literally nothing stopping us from fixing them.

Which is why it’s frustrating when we don’t do it. As if there are not enough truly intractable problems facing us, we have to go and compound them by manufacturing more out of our heads! So back to square A – why women?

I think it’s because they encapsulate much of what is wrong with our attitudes and behavior today. Believing in human rights and equality is a mindset and the way a person treats women is a symptom of that mindset. Women’s rights are a barometer and by focusing on them, I’m able to challenge and bring to the front many outdated and inhumane ways of thinking.

There are other disadvantaged groups of course like homsexuals and animals. But neither of them have come into the public spotlight enough to make others sit up and take notice for very long. The right of gay people to exist and have a decent life without harassment is a big one though and I’ve covered that quite a bit. But there are fewer stories, and fewer protests to keep drawing attention to it.

Another reason why I concern myself with women’s issues even though I’m a man is that bigotry doesn’t have just one enemy. When it targets a group of people, it’s only a matter of time before others are on the chopping block. Martin Niemöller wrote this famous poem describing the laid back attitude of German intellectuals during the rise of Hitler. It describes how everyone needs to stand up for injustice even though it’s not directly happening to them.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

We’re all in this together. Tomorrow when my neck is on the chopping block, there are people who will fight for my rights because they’re afraid that their turn will be next. But more than that, they’ll fight because they want to live in a fair and just world. And so will I.

Book Review – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

This book reminds me of two others – Birdsong and 100 Years of Solitude. The first because it gives a vivid description of the miseries of war stripped of all its glamor. The second because it portrays the transition of a family from start to finish. Many people may not like the ending, but that’s what it is. It fits in perfectly with the main theme that happy endings are not always a given. People get screwed over. But don’t worry! It’s not all that bad. The world moves on and new things grow where the old is destroyed. Like “Birdsong”, there is new life coming up all the time.

The story structure seems like a disconnected series of portraits to start off with, but then coalesces around the central storyline. Strangely enough, my first impressions as I started reading was that this was one of the funniest books I’ve ever read! The style of writing and the subtle humor are wonderful. The author displays a remarkable capacity for getting into people’s heads and giving their point of view. He does this with the president of Greece, and the madman Mussolini. Also the hero, heroine, and the doctor in the first chapter. I loved it.

The relationships in this book are very deeply explored. Father and daughter. Girl and first blush romance. Girl and second blush romance. Boy and grandmother. It’s all about relationships. This book is something of a bildungsroman – the style I like so much. Starting with the youth and moving on into old age.

I picked this off the BBC’s “Big Read” which is a list of 100 books to read before you die. And I’m grateful for it. Plays on your emotions like a…mandolin! Starting with a happy uplifting mood, to desolation, hopelessness, heartbreak and then the long road to forgiveness and hope. It’s the lives of everyday people that move us the most. Not kings and queens or mad despotic lunatics. If only “leaders” would just leave other people alone to live their lives in peace, so much misery can be avoided.

Don’t miss out on this one. You might be perplexed at the beginning and wonder where it’s going. But keep at it and you’ll be richly rewarded.

Let me put this in perspective. There are some men who feel that a woman “provokes” them. Either with constant nagging, or saying wicked things, or talking about their family or whatever. These are used as excuses to justify hitting her. Apparently they “lost control”. To these men I say – bullshit. You’re nothing but cowards. And here’s why.

Imagine that it’s not a woman in front of you but a huge burly guy fully capable of crushing your head. Or an ill tempered bear! Given the same provocation, would you hit these behemoths of pain in the same way you hit a woman? Or would you hold your hand back knowing full well that they can not only defend themselves but will punish you for trying? If you’ll keep your hands to yourself (and we all know you will), then your justifications of hitting a woman are an eyewash. You do it knowing that they won’t hit you back. In short – you are a coward.

There are those who justify sexual assaults against women in the same way. Apparently the logic goes that seeing a woman wearing “revealing clothing” or out late at night makes them lose control. Let me tell you what “losing control” means. It means your rational brain is no longer able to control your actions. If a person really “lost control”, they would do something regardless of the danger since they’re not listening to their brain anymore.

So here’s a question. If the woman was well protected by bodyguards, would you still “lose control” and attack her? Or if you knew she had an STD! Would you go ahead and rape her? Damn straight you wouldn’t. That means you never “lost control”. Your were fully sane and in complete possession of your senses. No excuses can separate you from your responsibility. You are a coward and a criminal.

Anyone who hits another without fear of being seriously hit back is a coward regardless of the provocation. This also applies to organized thugs like those employed by Bal Thackeray. His goons never assaulted the police commissioner or a politician did they? They only went after helpless Valentine’s day couples, shopkeepers, or anyone else who they knew they could bully.

If you try and draw an equivalence between “emotional violence” and physical violence and claim that one is just as serious as the other, I once again call bullshit. Physical violence removes choice. Emotional pressurizing or blackmailing still gives you the option to do exactly as you please. Saying that “women are just as bad” and using that as an excuse to hit one makes you an asshole, a criminal, and a coward all rolled into one.

Archive Solutions

At a personal level, I’ve found a variety of solutions that move all my documentation to the cloud. Using a mix of online document editors and online encrypted data services, I always have quick and easy access to most of the important stuff without needing to have the originals with me. I remember a time I was at the doctor’s and I didn’t have immediate access to my social security details. Thanks to my foresight, I was able to get them online using one of the services I’d signed up for. This to me is the future of storage. Original documents, birth certificates, school records and passports can be safely stored away in one place while digital copies reside in the cloud. Always accessible. Always safe.

I use Google Docs to store copies of important stuff like my passport and PAN cards all neatly organized into folders. When I need a copy I simply download them and take a print out. But when it comes to other information like my bank account details and credit card info and perhaps even banking passwords, I want a more secure encrypted solution. For this, I use LastPass. It’s free and has a convenient pre defined “secure notes” functionality that I find immensely useful. It’s perfect for pins, bank details and sync keys. The data is encrypted on their servers using your secret passphrase so even LastPass employees themselves cannot access it. The data is yours. Truly and completely.

Incidentally, LastPass is a great way to keep your online passwords safe. I make sure that I use the inbuilt password generator to create complex passwords for all the sites I have an account with – hundreds of them. They’re all stored securely using high end encryption and I can access them from any browser using the plugin they provide. It’s never let me down. And in case you’re paranoid, you can download a backup that’s also encrypted or in a spreadsheet. Your choice.

It’s the 21st century! We should use the technology available to us in order to make our lives easier. When we have the tools to do it, why don’t we?

The Devil and the Deep

For all this I want to punish the UPA and Congress. I want it to realize that there’s competition out there and that if it wants my vote it has to aim to do better. The problem is that the BJP is the only other party with a chance of beating it…and based on what I’ve seen I can’t give my vote to it. I wish I could – I’m not a Congress fan. But from what I’ve seen, no matter how bad the Congress is, the BJP is worse. Here are a few reasons.

BJP’s Ideology

Unlike the Congress, many elements within the BJP along with organizations linked to it like the RSS and the VHP have an agenda. They have this whole “Hindu” thing going on. This leads all kinds of lunatics to gain a platform. The chief of the RSS Bhagwat said that marriage is a contract where the wife has to do the household chores.

And this is just one example. There are utterances from these elements saying that they want “Hindu raj” and they go prattling about how India had a great past and they want to restore it and all that bullshit. Instead of focusing on the future. The RSS is now opposing the lowering of the age of consent from 18 to 16 on the ground that it’s “against society“. These things worry me. The BJP’s fundamental ideology is backward and disturbs me.

I can attribute the screw ups of the Congress to:

1. Incompetence
2. Corruption / Greed
3. Vote bank politics
4. Not understanding what our Constitution is about

These are bad things but they’re motivations of rational people – they’re not insane. The BJP on the other hand is all of the above plus it has a very powerful ideology in addition to them. I don’t trust people with crazy ideologies. They can’t be reasoned with. Rational and sane people respond to incentives. People with ideologies like the RSS cannot be trusted.

Bottom line: I prefer incompetence to insanity.

Modi Repulses Me

I’m not willing to vote for Modi as a PM. Regarding the whole Godhra incident, he hasn’t even apologized for letting the situation get out of hand or expressed regret that it occurred in the first place. I’ll bow to the court’s wisdom and concede that he didn’t deliberately set the whole thing up. But it’s abundantly clear that it was allowed to get out of hand as several commissions and reports have shown. I’d like him to at least say he’s sorry for the fact that it happened.

Secondly I don’t like Modi’s attitude, and the way he speaks. Too full of abuses, and personal attacks. There’s no graciousness in him. I don’t want a person like that to represent me and my country. I’ve heard him speak and the way he panders to the worst in people, setting communities against each other makes me sick.

Continually Obstructing Parliament

I think all parties do this. Over the past 8 years or so, the BJP has consistently opposed the government on every single measure. Not once have they said “Awesome – we really need this”. Whether it’s the nuclear bill, FDI or petrol prices, the BJP has stalled parliament and created a nuisance. As it is so many of our lawmakers don’t attend parliament. These shenanigans make the situation even worse.

To vote for the BJP, here’s what I want it to do:

• Forswear Hindutva, the RSS and every single Hindu organization. Become a non-religious party.
• Choose someone other than Modi as the Prime Ministerial candidate. There are actually quite a few reasonable sounding people in there (comparatively)
• Promise to repeal section 66A of the IT Act, and show us that you affirm full Freedom of Expression for Indians

Only then will I see it as a reasonable alternative to the Congress.

All you need is an Internet connection, and your choice of headset and microphone. I prefer to use my wife’s Bluetooth headset so I can walk around all over the house chatting far more comfortably than if I had a handset trapped between my ear and shoulder. If you don’t have one already, log into Google Voice and set your number up. It’s a pity I can’t get a non US one, but if you’re based solely in this country, that won’t be a problem.

Once you’ve set it up and confirmed your shiny new number, head over to the gear icon in the Google Voice website at the top right and hit “Settings”. You should see an option to enable forwarding calls to Google Chat as show in the screenshot:

Enable Google Voice to work with Google Chat

This will allow you to integrate your Google Voice number with GTalk within Gmail and gives you access to free calls anywhere in the US and Canada! By enabling this option, all calls directed to your number will ring your GTalk service if you have Gmail open. If you use Chrome like I do, install the nifty Chat for Google extension so you can talk even when you don’t have the Gmail tab open.

You’re almost set up. If you intend to chat using the built in microphone and speaker system, nothing more is required. If you’re like me, you’d like a little more convenience so we need to set up our Bluetooth headset. It’s easy. Make sure your headset is powered on and paired with your Bluetooth enabled laptop. Then go to Gmail, click the gear icon and select “Settings”, and then choose the “Chat” tab. Under the “Voice and video chat” subheading, select your Bluetooth device from withing the “Microphone” and “Speakers” drop-down box like this:

Chat Options in Gtalk

Verify that the settings are working by clicking the blue link and you’re all done! To make a call using your Google voice number, simply select the call option within Gmail or click the telephone icon in the Chat for Google extension. To receive a call you don’t have to do anything – just wait for someone to dial your number. I sometimes have an issue where the Bluetooth options in the dropdown boxes as shown above get deselected after a reboot. If this happens, just enable it again. I’ve also found that switching my headset on and off achieves the same effect.

So now you know! I can’t understand why anyone even uses land lines anymore when you can make and receive free calls like this using Google Voice with many more features like transcribed voicemail, forwarded SMSs, call screening, “Do not Disturb” service and much more. Seems like a no brainer to me.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The first thing that struck me was the language. Intoxicating. Not flowery or ambitious. Just right. We don’t see it in today’s books. Certainly not on the Internet! Interwoven with the story are a series of thoughts that I could entirely relate to. Such as being nostalgic about a room that one had spent even a little time in. I’ve felt that way about hotel rooms. That I’ve somehow imprinted myself onto the walls, the bed, the chairs. Just a tiny part of me. Or restrooms that I will never visit again. It’s strange, but I definitely feel it. I know not everyone does. Perhaps most don’t.

Another sentiment regards the state of elderly people in their dotage. How often do we look at those far away eyes, that frail body rocking in the chair, that forgetful mind and think to ourselves “There was a time when she used to be someone to reckon with! A force in her world!” A time when they were as full of emotions and thoughts as we ourselves are now. Do they remember any of it? Do they look back over the years and wonder about how they came to be the way they are today? I’ve often wondered at how I myself would manage when I’m old. It’s as if the author was speaking my deepest thoughts.

The powerful personality at the center of the book is Rebecca. And she isn’t even alive! The protagonist (if we want to call her that) is a completely insipid and spineless wretch of a girl who really needs to grow a pair. If the book has one moral of the story, it’s this: Don’t give a shit about what people think or say. Live your life and try not to harm anyone. Rebecca asserts a malign influence throughout the plot. A kind of gothic brooding presence. She might have been a strong and admirable character were it not for her utter lack of feeling and empathy. But we always knew there’s more to Rebecca than her perfection. Something sinister. And her close associate Danvers is quite spine chilling in her own right. She goes to work on the poor heroine of the story who doesn’t stand a chance. Not a ghost of a chance even.

If I didn’t know better, I would call “Rebecca” a horror novel. One whose mood builds up slowly and almost without us noticing it. Eventually you’re conscious of a kind of shadow hanging over everyone with Mrs. Danvers being the chief architect. And Rebecca…good god. How can someone exert such a toxic and willfully spiteful influence on people from under the ground? Brrr!

Some have compared “Rebecca” to “Jane Eyre”. But the two heroines are such polar opposites and the atmosphere is so different that I can’t equate them even if the plot elements bear some similarities. I would recommend this book to anyone. Especially one to whom I want to make a point about not caring too much about how others see you or what they will think.

Government’s Misplaced Priorities

There are a few main lines of argument used against the idea of marital rape. First, that there’s no way to prove that it happened. While it’s true that there can difficulty collecting evidence, this is a red herring. Start by defining the crime, then we’ll think about how it should be proved. As of now, a man can openly claim in public that he violently rapes his wife all the time and the law cannot touch him! That is the problem.

Second, people say that when a woman gets married she agrees to have lifelong sex with her husband. That’s bullshit. A woman is not a personal sex slave. She will have sex with her husband if and when she feels like it. A wife is not a prostitute to whom a man pays money and gets to have sex with whenever he wants. If the man feels that his wife is not sexually active enough, he is more than welcome to sit down with her and talk about the problem and if nothing else works, apply for divorce. If he tries to force himself on her he is a criminal plain and simple regardless of what the law says. Sometimes the law is an ass and deserves to be ridiculed. This is one example.

Third, the government feels that the introduction of marital rape laws will “destroy marriage”. Let me point out that the government has no Constitutional mandate to protect marriage. It does however have the duty to protect the rights of its citizens! Which is more important?

Many are afraid that laws addressing marital rape will be abused by women much like the anti dowry law – section 498A. There is good reason to be concerned about this. But the solution is to have well drafted laws that are less amenable to abuse. Not to forgo the very idea of a law itself! We can shift far more of the burden of proof onto the person making the accusation for example because in a marriage, consent is presumed unless stated otherwise. I’m sure there are other legal safeguards we can come up with. But not having a law is unacceptable.

The true motive behind the opposition to marital rape might just be the resistance to a woman’s sexual autonomy. Men and even women are brought up with the idea that marriage is a license to have sex whenever the man wants. And that by refusing it, the woman is not doing her “duty”. Implicit in this line of reasoning is the notion that sex is not something that women enjoy. That they only do it for children and after that they don’t want it anymore. Instituting the idea of marital rape raises the specter of a man going for long periods without sex even though he’s married! I mean what’s the point then, right?

I now understand what the government meant when it said they were “protecting marriage”. What they they’re defending is not marriage per se, but the warped idea of marriage that Indians have. For them, marriage is just a license to have socially accepted sex. Allowing women to say “no” takes that away from them. In the future, they might *gasp* actually have to try and be nice to the woman, make her feel wanted, and be romantic. You can’t treat her like dirt and still exercise a god given right to use her body when you want.

And that sense of entitlement is probably the true reason for this resistance.

CloudFlare allows you to choose the level of caching and for my WordPress site, I set it to “Aggressive” so even css files referenced by query strings like those used in the Atahualpa theme are delivered using CloudFlare. The results are impressive and a lot of testing shows that my site speed is greatly improved.

But the weak link in the chain is the HTML itself. I would love CloudFlare to store my entire site on its servers – not just the static content like images, css and js. Lately I found out that this option is available using something known as “Page Rules”. With my free plan I can use three rules and configure them so that it caches everything on my blog – including HTML. Here’s what it looks like.

Cache Everything with CloudFlare – Including HTML

This pattern uses the wildcard “*” to tell CloudFlare that I want this rule to apply to all the pages on my blog. For these pages, I select the “Cache Everything” option, tell the Edge servers to refresh the content every 2 hrs and set the Browser cache expiry to 1 year. In practice, I’ll also exclude all my admin pages by creating another rule in front of this one with the pattern *bhagwad.com/blog/wp* and tell CloudFlare to bypass the cache for them.

Anyway, this works great. You’ll see your site speed zoom so fast you won’t be sure whether it even reloaded. It’s that good. Problem solved? Not really.

While most of the content on my blog is static, I get quite a few comments and these present a problem. When a visitor leaves a comment, they expect it to show up immediately. But CloudFlare’s servers continue to serve up the old page and so it looks as if their comment was eaten without a trace. Sure, it’ll eventually show up but it’s a very poor experience for those visitors who truly add value to your site by leaving a comment in the first place.

Ideally you’d like CloudFlare to instantly refresh its page cache for that one single page after the user posts a comment. You can manually purge pages under “CloudFlare Settings” for your site, but this obviously won’t work. Fortunately CloudFlare provides an API to do just this. You just need to get your hands dirty with a bit of PHP code.

But first, a warning. I’m not a pro PHP programmer. I can code in several languages, so it’s easy for me to pick up what’s happening and write some code of my own. But I’ve never actually written a program in PHP, so be careful! Go through this simple code carefully yourself to see if anything will go wrong. All I can say is that it seems to work fine for me. So let’s dive in!

The CloudFlare APIs give you a broad idea of how to purge a single file of your site from the CloudFlare cache. But the documentation is less than helpful in that it doesn’t give you the actual PHP syntax. Look at section 4.5 – “zone_file_purge” — Purge a single file in CloudFlare’s cache. That code there doesn’t work if you just paste it into PHP. I tried, got a big fat error, and had to retreat with my tail between my legs.

Apparently you need to use something called “curl” (cURL) to make this request and I had to split my head for hours figuring out what it is and how to write the damn code. Support for curl was enabled on my Bluehost shared hosting plan – just check your PHP configuration and do a Ctrl+F for “curl”.

I thought the best place to put this PHP code was at the end of my theme’s “functions.php” file. This way when I upgrade WordPress, my changes won’t be wiped out and I never plan on upgrading my theme. So we need to add a function that will run whenever someone posts a valid comment and tell CloudFlare to purge that particular file from it’s cache. Here it is:

function cloudflare_purge_file( $post_ID )
{
$fields = array(
'a' => 'zone_file_purge',
'tkn' => 'your token key',
'email' => 'your email',
'z' => 'your domain',
'url' => get_permalink()
);

//url-ify the data for the POST
foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value.'&'; }
rtrim($fields_string, '&');

//open connection
$ch = curl_init();

//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.cloudflare.com/api_json.html');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields_string);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

//execute post
$result = curl_exec($ch);

//close connection
curl_close($ch);
$friends = 'your email';
wp_mail( $friends, "File purged", $result );

return $post_ID;
}

Like any good programmer, much of this code is just heavily modified from elsewhere and repurposed to this task. I try and avoid typing in actual code myself as much as possible :). The comments are not mine either. But what’s happening is simple. We first create the data structure holding the necessary information required by the CloudFlare API. The keys ‘a’, ‘tkn’, ‘email’, ‘z’ and ‘url’ hold “zone_file_purge”, the token key, the email, the domain, and the url we want to purge. For this last value, I simply use the get_permalink() function defined in the file. The other values are those in your CloudFlare settings. You have to use the same email registered with your site CloudFlare. You can find your token API key under “Account” on the CloudFlare website.

The next part of the code formats the data field, initiates the curl connection to “https://www.cloudflare.com/api_json.html”, and passes in the paramters ending with “curl_exec()”. We store the result in $result.

The last part emails you with the output. It helps you see whether the request succeeded or failed. The response format is as specified in the CloudFlare API page and looks something like this if it succeeded:

{“request”:{“act”:”zone_file_purge”},”response”:{“vtxt_match”:null,”url”:”http:\/\/www.bhagwad.com\/blog\/2009\/haikus\/haikus-morning-serial.html\/”},”result”:”success”,”msg”:null}

If it didn’t succeed, the error message will tell you what went wrong and help you diagnose the problem.

So paste your code at the end of “functions.php” in your theme (before the closing “?>” php tag naturally). Now we just need to tell WordPress to run this whenever a comment is posted. So under that function, add:

add_action( 'comment_post', 'cloudflare_purge_file' );

This “hooks” into the comment post procedure and runs it each time a user submits a valid comment. You’re done and you should get an email each time a comment is posted letting you know a file was purged. After you’re sure it’s working, delete the two lines that send the email to stop getting notified and you should be set!

Ideally someone should just turn this into a WordPress plugin, but I don’t know enough about WordPress internals or PHP to do this and I’m not in the mood to learn either. This post itself is a useful reference for myself later on if I forget how to do it or need to revert the changes.

I’m still not able to get the page to return the most recent value immediately after a person submits a comment. But it does get the job done. Let me know whether or not this works for you.