Overdoing the Anna Hazare thing?

Aren’t we really overdoing this Anna Hazare thing? I mean, OK there is a civic society, it made its recommendations on the Lokpal draft but the government differed and passed their own version. Tomorrow, the parliament may pass a similar or a different bill. But let’s face it, ultimately its the parliament that has the “rights” to do it, we cannot allow a herd of people to dictate how laws should be made in this country, though they are free to suggest.

Haven’t we ignored such herds before? (remember demands of referendum/freedom?). If Anna’s group is able to arm-twist a government, then tomorrow we should be ready for other such “civic societies” coming up with their own sets of demands, we are opening a pandora’s box really. Imagine the mining mafia coming in thousands and forcing a reinstatement of their favorite leader. IMHO, it should be OK in a democratic setup to debate, oppose, resist, pressurize against, differ or agree with other’s views but we cannot ignore that ultimately the laws should be made by the elected representatives of the nation and not by the members of society, who lead but won’t contest elections to join active politics. When they are sitting on the fence we don’t even know which political party/ideology they might be representing, or whose business interests might be behind them. Why is not a single MP or MLA part of Anna’s team? (we cannot just say that none o the politicians want this bill, that’s an easy way out. Anna’s team should have the capability to convince the parliamentarians, they cannot wage a war to get their things done.)

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Facebook, baba and Christmas bhandara

By now we all know that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was in India. Speculations were ripe on his planning an Orkut killer product targeted specifically for Indian net users. Gossip website Techgoss had declared a bounty for his pictures and yet it seems nobody really knew why he was here.

Valleywag reports that Mark was actually here to follow on the footsteps of giants and take blessings from his spiritual guru Baba Neem Karoli. You & I may have never heard of this Baba, but he has been an inspiration for people like Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs and Google’s Larry Page, to name a few. Apparently Baba, who is actually knows as Neeb Karori in India, likes his Amreekan name of Neem Karoli better. He even has websites booked for all versions of his name at, and With high profile clientèle from Silicon valley at his disposal, Baba can’t afford to be off line, anytime. So apart from all other things there is even a Christmas Bhandara in his ashram.

So what did Mark actually ask Baba for? If he had an inkling of the scalability issues Twitter is facing, he would have asked for some tips to deal with ever growing userbase. But probably he just sought blessings for a win over arch rival Orkut. But who would Baba have favored from his disciples: Larry and Mark? Well, it all depends on what they offered to the divine Baba 🙂

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Can Mukesh Ambani control Free Wikipedia?

Logo of the English Wikipedia



