nobody’s saying either wrong is right. nobody’s blaming the one dude.

as an indian, i’ve always cringed at movies like baazi, kaante, aatank hi aatank, hum tum, chachi 420, zinda, ek ruka hua faisla, satte pe satta, sholay, qayamat, ghulam, and a boatload of other shameless rip-offs and i was just marvelling at the irony of the situation.

still is. it just hasn’t been properly mucked out.

the hindi film industry is itself littered with corpses of stolen ideas from other film industries across the world for decades now.

seems karma’s come home to roost if this story is true.

yeah, but they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, so there was no mission to accomplish.

why? wouldn’t you be hungry hungry?

fun fact: famed italian soccer club ac milan actually began as a football and cricket team.

don’t worry, friend. it wouldn’t be long before that ice sheet has melted and the rest of the world is virtually set on fire.

we’ll all collectively give up mother earth so that you can keep your arse toasty warm.

from the article in the OP:

The global warmth is linked to human-caused climate change and a powerful El Niño event, which ended in June.

do give it a read. it also refers to this abnormal set of temperatures being more of a trend over the past twenty years rather than a one-off event like sunspot activities.

i don’t quite see the point of ostriching ourselves into denying our part in climate change. all that does is absolve the large corporations that have accelerated it of any blame.

to add an interesting anecdote, there is an archer in indian mythology called Ekalavya who apparently showed great promise. he practiced his craft in honour of a legendary warrior called Dronā(chārya), assuming him to be his teacher, imagining how he would teach, and learning thus on his own.

Dronā himself was semi-retired by then and was teaching the princes of Hastināpur (5 of whom form the principle protagonists and 100 more of whom are the primary antagonists of the indian epic poem “Mahābhārata”) and, when he saw Ekalavya, he was afraid that this untitled prodigy would upstage his more royal proteges.

so he invoked an indian custom which states that a student must give a teacher whatever is asked of them and asked Ekalavya for his right thumb. his aim was to not let Ekalavya overshadow his charges since an archer needs his thumb to grip an arrow properly. Ekalavya cut his thumb off without hesitation and presented it to the teacher. Dronā was deeply touched by the willingness to undergo this sacrifice, as the story goes.

the relevance to this news article is that Ekalavya went on to practice drawing the bow with his feet instead and achieving aimilar levels of accuracy. this story in the OP is more than an archer overcoming her difficult circumstances; it’s also about her reliving a celebrated legend.

(although, separately, why Ekalavya just didn’t switch to being a southpaw, i don’t know.)

She said Bishop was identified from footage afterwards…

also, he wouldn’t stop walking diagonally.

they should have just made the air marshalls carry rocks. or stones for flights going to the UK.

either way, just avoid paper.

the data from india is incomplete and not fit for the analysis you’re attempting. the actual problem lies in misogyny; rape is more of a symptom of that than a series of unrelated incidents.

misogyny, also, is a symptom by itself of indians making categories and preference tables for virtually every fucking thing. we discriminate on gender, skin colour (it’s legal to advertise and sell “skin whitening creams” here!), religion, caste, sect, language (we have about 530 active dialects), state, height, weight, food preferences (india has the highest percentage and, therefore, the highest population of native vegetarians), occupations, the list is endless.

heck, cows live a better life than most women in this country. unless we start seeing each other as fellow human beings, the situation here is simply not going to improve. ever.

it’s not just the government. that’s pretty much the response of any of the majority that voted for that government. it’s embedded into our culture.

pointing out a mistake is greater sacrilege than committing that mistake in the first place. press freedom is the lowest it’s been. and we have things like stand-up comics being arrested for “hurting sensitivities”.

the OP is right. we indians will always sweep info about our mistakes under the rug and this country, therefore, will never improve.

sometimes, one thinks, any intelligence for government would be a good idea.

ah, the british and their penchant for carving unwanted lines.

ah, so it was another misunderstanding, then. she was taught that the queen can do absolutely anything on the chess board and proceeded accordingly.

it was all a result of a misunderstanding. his coach told him to focus on the H, G files of the chessboard and he heard that as something else.

wait till you hear about their approach to roulette!

you do know that you are technically dead-naming, right?

for a minuscule impact on climate.

who defines what is miniscule here? what if an oil baron deems 20% to be miniscule? do we all go swimming in their blackened beaches?

how is 2% miniscule? and who says that emission reduction exercises have to stop at 2%?

it’s sometime very easy to minimise the seriousness of something with the clever use of generic statements. there are enough spin doctors already trying to pull the wool over our eyes–we don’t need to help them by also shooting ourselves in the foot.