Caturday Cat Loves Winter

By two_kittehs

Caturday Cat gets it right. 

Give The Thought Police A Millimeter, They Will Take a Light Year

I first heard of Charlie Hebdo only this week, when the attack on their offices was breaking news. I don’t understand French, nor am I a scholar of Islam, so I cannot truly judge either how distasteful or funny the cartoons are.  However, I do know that tasteful or not no one deserves to die for expressing an idea. Also, religious zealots of any religion should not have a veto over what ideas can and cannot be discussed. If  zealots of one  stripe can dictate terms of acceptable discourse you tacitly extend the courtesy to  zealots of all persuasions. This is not a hypothetical slippery slope but something that has actually happened in India.

In the late 80’s the Congress led government under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in their infinite wisdom decided to ban the import of Salman Rushdie’s  Satanic Verses because they deemed that the book might hurt the feeling of some in India’s Muslim community. Since Penguin’s Indian imprint had already decided not to publish The Verses in India due to its content, the book was de facto banned in India. In fact India became the first country to ban the Verses.

Since 1988, many  other books have either been outright banned or pulled from the shelves in India. Fiction, non-fiction, anything is fair game.  Anything that anyone, especially the emboldened Hindu right wing parties find remotely uncomfortable gets banned in India these days.  This list includes pulp fiction like The Da Vinci code or a non-fiction doorstop about the alternative history of  Hinduism by Wendy Doniger and books on Shivaji and Gandhi.  This ridiculousness does not stop with  books on religion and historical figures, among the banned  books  are books about an airline and another one about a the rags to riches story about the  textile baron, Dhirubhai Ambani.  Here is  Wikipedia’s list of the books that are not freely available in India. 

Go Police Someone Else’s Thoughts

 

By two_kittehs

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

By two_kittehs

This lol made it to the FP of Animal Caphshunz on ICHC, yesterday, is on pg 2 right now. 

Happy New Year

Whoever decided that the coldest month of the year in the northern hemisphere would be a great time for new beginnings? After the short spell of warm weather (>30 degrees F) we are back in the icebox again, with the temperatures at night and early mornings in the teens and single digits.  On the bright side, it was sunny this morning. Why not begin the new year at the start of spring, after all that’s the time when nature renews itself.  New year’s resolutions would stand a much better chance that way.

Not that anyone else cares, one of my bloggy resolutions for this year is to blog more. Last year especially in the latter half of the year, blogging had been sporadic, since other shiny things were vying for my attention.  All said and done, it is hard work being a kitteh of many worlds.

I want it all and I want it now

By two_kittehs