Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Fakes live longer...

Take the case of fakes. They last longer than their lifetime. Look at the number of "serious mails" that seem to offer you hundreds of millions of dollars. They have not stopped since I know internet. I know several men in parts of Bengal who used to go around with a photocopied one million dollar note asking people if they could help them with changing the original, as they said, the original was with one of their friends or close relative. Once I had a chance of seeing one of those. I had to get to business. Not for calling up the police or money changer. But to the internet, to check if it was true. Well, it was! Only that it is a memorial note, and had hardly any value. And you could buy it on the internet the same thing starting from 300 rupees to 2000 rupees! Last year someone started circulating a mail saying that Microsoft and AOL are paying them in thousands of dollars for passing on the message. Why should Bill Gates part with his fortune? To check if you are running a original version of Microsoft OS or not! Heavens! It would cost him less to open source the code than to pay these rogues, check if their OS was genuine, pay for every forwarded mail 245 US dollars, as the mail claimed. I wrote back to people who were forwarding this asking them to stop this nonsense.

Since last week another mail is circulating, which I had actually seen three years ago. The mail has graphic pictures of slaughtering of "dolphins" in the sea shores of Denmark, and says that Denmark is to be blamed for this, and everyone must protest, and asks all to sign the protest letter. The problem is : a) Those are not dolphins, but long finned pilot whales (b) The event takes place in Faroe islands, and not in Denmark. Faroe islands do not depend on Denmark for internal administration; they are not even part of European Union, although it depends on Denmark for foreign affairs and defence. (c) If people have not done anything in three years time, with all the animal rights activists around, I don't think much will happen with the signature campaign (d) It is not a festival as the picture claims, but an event attended by the local islanders as they try to catch them, kill them all for eating! (Hei, that's what every fishing is all about!) When the islanders see the whales all coming together they use motorized boats to slowly move them to shallow waters and then catch them and cut them.

Finally, you know what the islanders tell about us? They say, they are creating awareness to the world about what is happening every day across the seas all over the world....! They say, people of "the modern world have become so far removed from the harsh realities of animal food production that they have formulated unrealistic notions of how food actually gets to their tables". In other words, people think that animal and fish products come to their tables, as if plucked from an apple tree!

Personal opinion:
All forms of wanton violence is bad.

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