Hari's Corner

Papa Hari News Service

As a result of path-breaking research into the politics of Moral Responsibility, the Papa Hari Institute for Political Research and Analysis has developed a new form of packaged "moral responsibility" which will soon be marketed under the Papa Hari brand and available at all major stores.

Announcing the launch of the product on an experimental basis, a Papa Hari Spokesman claimed that moral responsibility would now be available in two kinds of packs: one with "resignation" and the other without. "It's obvious that the demands of moral responsibility all over the world varies considerably and so we felt that it would be a good idea to have different packages for the same product," the spokesman said.

The product with the resignation option has found favour with a large number of students in disciplinarian schools across the world. Raja (name changed to preserve anonymity), a student of a large public school known for its disciplinarian outlook has stunned authorities by being the first individual to come forward and accept moral responsibility for the global economic slowdown. In an exclusive interview to Papa Hari News Service, Raja said that he had announced his resignation from his position as a student of the school and would henceforth dedicate his free time in improving his knowledge of world economics, history and geography by playing highly educational video games like Age Of Empires and World of Warcraft online. "I think that as a representative of a future generation of world leaders, we need to start accepting responsibility for global events and improve our own knowledge in small and practical ways," he said, before heading off to his friend's home to obtain a 'cracked' version of Age of Empires III.

Prison and college hostel inmates across the world have also preferred the "with resignation" product. One group of prisoners who purchased the product have unexpectedly owned moral responsibility for the rise in shipping piracy off the Somalian coast. Said Muthu (name changed) a representative of the inmates of an obscure prison in South India, "As despicable criminals, we feel responsible for events that have occurred on the high seas and we wish to set an example to every responsible citizen out there by resigning from our positions as prisoners of this institution. We have also magnanimously decided to give up our privileges of free accommodation and food offered by the State using taxpayers' hard earned wealth in order to save costs. We will be shortly vacating our quarters."

Politicians and business leaders worldwide have also welcomed the product but were more in favour of the "without resignation" package of the product. "Owning moral responsibility for bad things that happen in this world is the greatest and noblest form of sacrifice known to mankind and should absolve us from all other kinds of responsibility. Why then is resignation necessary? It is superfluous and smacks of political opportunism," said the CEO of an automobile giant that had suffered losses for five successive quarters resulting in job cuts. "In order to compensate myself for the immense mental anguished caused by owning moral responsibility for my company's poor performance, I have decided to give myself a very reasonable raise of $10 million a year. This decision has been looked on favourably by the board of directors," he continued in a tone of utmost gravity and sincerity before heading off to the golf course to relieve his mind of the pressures of his demanding job.

The Papa Hari spokesman said that packaged moral responsibility would be priced reasonably and be available to every single tax-paying member of society. However, the last clause has reportedly caused a great deal of anguish amidst the political and business classes who feel that such unfair restrictions will most likely reduce the marketing potential of an otherwise wonderful product. The Papa Hari Marketing Research team, still working on the final phase of the product launch, has declined to offer any comment on this issue.

The question is what?

Section 1: Title, Object and Jurisdiction of this Act

This Act shall be titled the Papa Hari Prevention of Bad Singing Act, hereinafter referred to as BSA 2009, with the noble objective of preventing acts of bad singing in public (defined in Sec 2) and protecting members of the public and television viewers from temporary or permanent impairment to intellect and/or hearing caused by over-exposure to bad musical performances, whether by means of direct, live broadcasting or pre-recorded shows, with or without instrumental accompaniment, and shall include both amateur and professional competitions frequently broadcast during "Prime Time" referred to as Reality Shows or any other name by private entertainment networks.

The Act shall extend to the whole jurisdiction of the Papa Hari World Government and will come into force with immediate effect from its date of passing.

Section 2: Definition of Bad Singing in Public

Subsection A: Bad singing means any act of exercising the vocal chords by a human being either in the name of singing or in a manner which is understood to be a form of singing, at that minimum decibel level which causes disorientation or annoyance when heard either directly or through a medium to the subject in question assuming that such subject be a reasonably representative member of the public for this purpose.

Subsection B: Bad singing in public, shall include, but not be limited to, any act of bad singing as defined in Section 2.A. above, in any public place, any private place to which members of the public are invited freely or otherwise have access to without committing trespass, any radio station or building, any television studio or any other location where such acts are either broadcast directly to the public (OR) recorded electronically or by other means with the express intention of broadcasting to public either by means of audio or visual media or any other means which causes such bad singing to be transmitted and heard by members of public.

Illustration 1: A along with B, sings loudly in a public park, with the intention of attracting members of the public. Here A and B are involved in bad singing as defined under this, the BSA 2009 and shall be liable for punitive measures under section 3.A. below.

Illustration 2: A television network, X holds a reality show with the purpose of determining "musical talent" and thereby broadcasts bad singing by A, B and C to the public. Here the television network X and also A, B and C are involved in bad singing under this, the BSA 2009. Here X shall be liable under Section 3.B. while the individual singers shall be liable under 3.A. below.

Section 3: Punishment for indulging in bad singing in public

Subsection A: Punishment for singers Anybody found guilty of bad singing under section 2.B. shall be forbidden from the act of singing until it can be proven that singing by such bad singer shall cease affecting reasonable members of the public as defined under section 2.A.

Subsection B: Punishment for organizers Organizers, whether television networks, radio stations or other members of the public, who either directly encourage the act of bad singing, are involved in judging such competitions, or who broadcast such bad singing, knowingly or otherwise, shall be restrained from broadcasting any music programmes for a period of 10 years or until they guarantee never to broadcast any other music programme of the nature described above. The Papa Hari World Government may collect any amount of compensation from such parties as it deems fit as damages not exceeding a sum of $100,000.

As the nightmarish terrorist attack on Mumbai has drawn to a close, thanks to the heroic efforts of our security forces (the NSG and the other elite arms of the military, the police and the fire department), I pay my humble tribute to their heroism and my condolences to all those (innocent civilians and our soldiers) who were butchered in cold blood in these horrific attacks.

Below is my humble cartoon - an NSG commando in action amidst the blazing inferno. (Please excuse any technical defects )

Currently this blog is powered by my own blogging system which I've been working on for the last several weeks (yes, even the smilies are my own). What a feeling of exhilaration it is to go live with it!

At the moment, I'm over the moon. I've done most of the hard work in porting over my old b2evolution blog to the new one and even updated the internal links (which was a long-drawn tedious process), but there's still some work left: mainly testing and fine-tuning. Until then I'm not going to release the blog software in public (yes, I am going to release it under the GPL soon).

I have to thank Drew for all his help in getting SQLite 3 to work with PHP to make this dream come true. I also thank all my blogging friends for being patient with me during this period of inactivity over the last couple of months.

Please be sure to update your RSS feed URLs for this blog as the old one will not work any longer.

Also if you've recently linked any of my old articles, please update the URL to match the new one if it is convenient.

Tip: All new permalinks have the format:
http://harishankar.org/blog/entry.php/link-to-article
rather than the earlier format
http://harishankar.org/blog/YYYY/MM/DD/link-to-article.

It is with great satisfaction that I announce the completion of the article display and commenting system for my blog software in development.

Here is a list of entry-specific features:

• Separate draft and publish modes with separate drafts management section.
• Optional parsing of smilies in posts as smilie images.
• Pseudo-clean URL support for entries based on "stub" (e.g. entry.php/this-is-an-entry)
• Ability to make an entry "featured" - that is have it displayed permanently in the sidebar. This can also double up as a "static page" feature.

Commenting is a key component of a blogging system and I've implemented these comment-specific features:

• Optional anti-spam CAPTCHA to prevent spambots (which is highly recommended).
• Ability to disable/close commenting on a per-article basis.
• Ability to hide the list of comments on a per-article basis (while still allowing comment submission for that article).
• Optional (global) moderation of individual comments.
• HTML disallowed, but smilies parsed in comments.

Since comments are the lifeblood of a blog, I think I have approached it right. I might still need to implement a few more anti-spam measures, but that will come after intensive testing at a later stage.

Having crossed this milestone, the implementation of category-specific and date-based archives will be relatively smooth.