The Left of the moral side

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." ~ C.S. Lewis

Sincerely made me think of the leftists of this country, coincidence?

Exhibition and Child labor

We went to the exhibition last week(11th). Whoever had the idea that having the exhibition on the banks of Cooum would be great idea must be really sick. Probably, Island grounds was a great place 150 years back. But now, it is only an piece of land surrounded by Cooum flowing to its brim in dark black color and a stench to match it. And it is not a great idea to put a blanket on the banks and eat giant appalams anyway. Pollution in Cooum is amazingly uncontrolled and the way everyone walks around taking it for granted is unbelievable. Simple solution: construct a 15 polluted water recycling plants or sewage treatment plants along the baks of cooum in Chennai alone and clean the water and send it into the river again. Simple but difficult to implement. Read here about how NYC treats Hudson and North river sewage using 14 plant. But for a country like US, it took 67 years to proceed from proposal to implementation. So, I dont think I will survive to see the day Cooum will be flowing like a normal river!!

 

Then went to Besant nagar beach this weekend (18th). If the Tamilnadu government is serious enough to implement the child labor laws it should look no further. No, I am not taking about the kids selling sundal or balloons or bajji there. You watch any family with a small kid (1-5 years of age), you will find another kid(always a girl in the 8-14 age range) watching over the kid. This will be true always for families where both the parents are working. Even my neighbor has a small girl to care of their kid. The treatment meted out to these kids vary from bad to worse. And it teaches a kind of class awareness to the kids who also start treating the girls as bosses. These girls always live with the family all the time and are not even allowed to visit their parents or have vacation etc. While the middle class is vociferous about their perks, they don't even have a conscience to treat these girls atleast moderately well. Probably, these people will argue strongly against child labor with these girls around. The lack of compassion and the skewed moral compass of these people is just horrendous. A sound case to describe middle class hypocrisy!!

Sun tech days...

I was attending the 'Sun Tech days' for the past three days and was annoyed to hell with it. Before launching the tirade, the good things. The lunch (catered by Chola Sheraton) was exemplary. The evening entertainment with Sivamani and 'Vikku' Vinayakram was fantastic and the goodie bag was excellent. Thats pretty much it. The sessions were all total bores with very less technical content and it was one long promotional session for 'Netbeans', Java studio creator and other Sun products. Obviously it is a sponsored show by Sun but at least the focus could be on Java itself for a change. I slept throught the SAP key note delivered by a guy named Venkatesh who couldn't modulate his voice and was talking in a flat pitch which will make a bear hibernate in summer. Other sessions were not much to say anything of worth. And the college crowd was pleased to have the good food along with the attendance and the goodies. And we decided not to attend it anymore.

And Sibi was not feeling well for the past 3 days and finally got well now. He is having fun time drawing anything and everything that comes to his mind. Its kind of amazing to note some of the things he draws. Some odd things (at least to me, not to him!!) he has drawn are the toilet, TV with rhymes in it, tortoise mosquito coil, himself etc. How his mind works is totally amazing!!