Believe it or not, atheism is the fastest growing RELIGION in the world…
I hold and repeatedly stress that Hindu Gods and Hinduism (no, I won't comment about the others, but people are free to drawn their own conclusions) are the CREATION (or figment of the imagination!) of people who founded them.
Some additional fodder for thought is provided in Hindustan Times today by its health editor Sanchita Sharma…
",,, an increasing number of educated people in developed countries are describing themselves as religiously unaffiliated… it's difficult to pt a number on atheists worldwide, but the trend is clear: faith and belief in God declines wherever the quality of life improves. Nigel Barber argues in his 'Why atheism will replace religion: The triumph of earthly pleasure over pie in the sky, is a security blanket that gives hope to the deprived. If you give them money instead, people forget religion and get their fix from drugs, alcohol and/or entertainment.."
(Me: Most of us 'educated' Indians continue to believe in Gods: we go to college not to seriously study science – and develop a scientific temper that questions irrationality and superstitious beliefs – but to learn the subject by rote to acquire a degree and land a cushy job!).
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Me make no bones of my antipathy for cricket… I wonder how cricket that is played over 5 or 6 hours a day for 5 days and that most often ends in a tame, drab draw, offering no edge-of-the-seat entertainment can be called a sport. The one-day international is only slightly better.
Now, Karan Thapar in HT offers some insight on why match- and/or spot-fixing is so blatantly, brazenly common in cricket.
"Given that you can never tell whether a no ball, a wide ball, a full toss or simply a bad delivery was deliberate or accidental, isn't cricket unique in providing fertile ground for fixing. Could it be that spot-fixing is happening in any or every game, at any time, in any country, without anyone knowing except those who are involved? Indeed, is cricket more vulnerable than other major international sports such as football, tennis or athletics? I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is yes."
Me: If Srisanth made 20 lakhs rupees for a faking a single over consisting of just six ball deliveries, the bookies and the fraud betters would have made a killing of at least a couple of crores, out of the single over, at the cost of other relatively genuine punters).
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Deft definition for economics by Ben Bernanke, chief of US Federal Reserve, the oracle himself, no less..
"Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong"
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Shobhaa De's new interpretation for BCCI = Board of Crooked and Corrupt India
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The news not so well publicized…
Spying helped foil NYC terror plot
A senior US intelligence official said the secret programme that tracked hundreds of millions of domestic phone records helped disrupt a 2009 terror plot to bomb New York City subways, as it was thwarted because of the secret collection of phone records by the NSA.
(If there was no e-surveillance and the plot had been successful, the same armchair critics in the media would have panned the government for being grossly ineffective. Secret eavesdropping is a small price that the otherwise law-abiding citizens have to and be prepared to pay).
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