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Showing posts from September, 2008

Wake up, bloggers

Bloggers, wake up! For long the mainstream media has been plagiarising pictures from our blogs for long. And they seem to get away with it with impunity. Because they don't respond to emails. They don't publish letters sent to the editor about their reporters lifting images with impunity. How can they -- these losers can't stand up to own their mistakes; they don't have the balls to do that. Yes I said it, they lack the balls. They copy images, text, opinions, and they aren't man enough to acknowledge the source: let alone ask for permission or compensate monetarily. Twilight Fairy , Archana , Bobinson have pointed it out before. And now, Shrinidhi finds one of his pics on the Times of India. The question is, how do we fight it? And the answer is right here: we have our own blogs. Remember, united we stand and divided we fall. So on October 2nd, let us all post something about this plagiarism. It should only be fitting that we all stand together and lodge our prot

In defence of formal education

It has become a fad nowadays to denounce formal education. If not denounce, a lot of us think the process is futile, and that the knowledge gathered there would be of no use in the future in most of the professions we go into. This idea was triggered more by Rashmi 's posts trying to answer her daughter's questions about why she needs to go to school. (Read the second part here ) Make no mistake, I agree with a lot of her points of view. But the point that I don't agree with is that you have learned most of what you will need to know (the three R's and basic math and social science) and should be done with formal education from then on. I've heard similar views from other people over cups of tea, when they cut jokes like "Why the hell do I need to know what wars Akbar fought?" or "Why should I care what type of ocean drift goes past Russia?". This post actually is a response to such questions. The idea is not to assimilate facts, but to discove