The mistake some of us make when we talk about the budget…

… is in assuming that government spending can solve all our problems. The government may spend more on education, but that doesn’t mean that Indian kids will get anywhere near the education they should, or that the education system will become better. Our mai-baap sarkar may announce a safety net for workers, but that doesn’t mean that workers will benefit. It may extend the REGB, but that doesn’t mean that it is doing anything to enable the growth of employment in this country. In some cases, it might actually be harming the cause of those it claims to benefit, by spending money inefficiently that, had it never been taxed in the first place, would have done more good for the economy.

Beyond that broad point, I will offer no comments on the budget—there’s enough of it out there in the MSM already. I’m just glad there isn’t a cess on blogging.

Additional notice: My “Thinking it Through” column won’t appear today in Mint, because they needed the space for budget analysis, some of which is very good. Regular service resumes next week.

Blowjob Nation

Caitlin Flanagan writes in the Atlantic Monthly:

The moms in my set are convinced—they’re certain; they know for a fact—that all over the city, in the very best schools, in the nicest families, in the leafiest neighborhoods, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are performing oral sex on as many boys as they can. They’re ducking into janitors’ closets between classes to do it; they’re doing it on school buses, and in bathrooms, libraries, and stairwells. They’re making bar mitzvah presents of the act, and performing it at “train parties”: boys lined up on one side of the room, girls working their way down the row. The circle jerk of old—shivering Boy Scouts huddled together in the forest primeval, desperately trying to spank out the first few drops of their own manhood—has apparently moved indoors, and now (death knell of the Eagle Scout?) there’s a bevy of willing girls to do the work.

In her piece, Flanagan tells us about how the nature of teenage sexuality has changed in her lifetime. She is horrified by what she calls “Blowjob Nation,” and believes that we are “raising children in a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households—individual mothers and fathers—are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment.”

Reading too much into elections

The BJP has done well in the Punjab and Uttarakhand elections, and already people are calling it “a saffron wave.” That is as much rubbish as all that talk about the UPA having got a mandate from the last elections. (As I mentioned here, one look at the constitution of this Lok Sabha should disabuse notions of a “collective will.”) Individuals vote in elections for their own individual reasons, and much of the time, in an age of a fractured electorate and hung parliaments, huge amounts of luck determines who gets into power.

It is, of course, typical of us to try to discern patterns in all of this. But these patterns, these mandates, they’re illusory things. No point celebrating or mourning yet, depending on which party you support. Flip-flop hota rahega.

Also read: my essay from last week, Don’t Think in Categories. It’s relevant.

Aren’t you glad we’re on top of the food chain?

If you have the stomach for it, check out this guide on how to make a steak. The images are graphic, so be warned.

It reminds me of Tolstoy’s chicken, actually. It would be quite enough to make me a vegetarian if I hadn’t already gone down that path, and returned. Immense self-loathing comes, but I’m reconciled to that.

(Link via email from Gautam John. And, um, this is my last post on cows. So, for the last time, here are my previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83.)

On making budgets and winning elections

Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, in a piece titled “Parable of the Shopkeeper,” offer us this mind game:

Suppose you plan to open a shop on a street that is lined with houses. These houses are evenly distributed along the street. There are two things you know at this point of time. There is a competitor who is patiently waiting to open a shop just next to yours. And the customers who live along this street will walk into the shop that is nearest to their homes.

So, where will you build your store?

Well, if you build it at the corner, your competitor will simply build one next to yours but closer to the center, so more people will end up going there. The logical thing, therefore, is to build one close to the center. And that, indeed, is what politicians do. As Niranjan writes:

Jesus in an ossuary

Scott Adams speculates on how angry Haysoos would be if he’d been trapped in an ossuary for 2000 years and someone found it and let him out now.

If I was Haysoos and someone kept me in an ossuary for 2000 years, I wouldn’t be angry—I’d be horny. 2000 years, dude. How’s God going to have grandchildren at this rate?

Full RSS feeds and email subscription now available

India Uncut is a work in progress, and we take feedback very seriously. Many readers wrote in to me complaining about partial RSS feeds, so I’m pleased to announce that every section of this site now has its own RSS feed, which will carry posts in toto. (The Extrowords crossword cannot be replicated in a feed, so that will have a few sample clues to give you a taste of what to expect.)

So, to get to the point, here come the feeds. Please copy the urls below and paste them into whichever feed reader you use. If you use Bloglines, that subscription link is provided, simply open it in a new window.

The India Uncut Blog: http://feeds.feedburner.com/IUB. (Bloglines users, click here.)

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Workoutable: http://feeds.feedburner.com/workoutable. (Bloglines.)

Extrowords: http://feeds.feedburner.com/extrowords. (Bloglines.)

There is also a combined India Uncut feed you can subscribe to, which carries content from all these sections except Linkastic. (The volume of posts there would overwhelm the rest of the content.) That feed is here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/indiauncut-full. (Bloglines.)

If you want to subscribe to the content of the above feed by email, you’ll find a place to leave your email ID on the right column.

In spite of all this, I hope you continue coming to the site itself. We’ve worked very hard to make it look good and function well, and will be introducing new features, and maybe sections, as time goes by. Also, you can only play the Extrowords crossword on the site. Have you had a crack at it yet?

I also get asked about comments. Well, comments are open on Rave Out, and will be opened once in a while for selected posts on the India Uncut Blog.

Please keep the feedback coming, either by using the contact form here, or by emailing me directly. I often fail to reply to all the emails I get, because of the sheer volume of them, but I take all feedback seriously, and I thank you in advance!

Enough carrot. Time for stick

Dick Cheney landed in Pakistan a couple of days ago to urge Pervez Musharraf to get serious about fighting al Qaeda. About time. This acknowledges that Pakistan wasn’t doing enough to wipe out al Qaeda to begin with, and no sensible man would expect otherwise. As I wrote here and here, it is not in Musharraf’s interest to end the battle with al Qaeda by winning it. Pakistan’s economy has flourished after 9/11 because it is the USA’s main ally in the War on Terror, and an end to the War on Terror means an end to aid and preferential treatment.

So the carrot was never likely to work. Will the stick fare better?

(Previous posts on Musharraf.)