Censorship!

In the aftermath of the bomb blasts in Mumbai, the government has done what all governments seem to do when terrorists strike. It's gone insane, and decided to brazenly violate the constitutional rights of its own citizens.

Trust some half-witted incompetent government dolt in charge of something to have come up with the bright idea of blocking the Blogspot and Typepad domains, plus quite a few others. Apparently this is because some nuts have been creating blogs with messages of hate and so forth, trying to incite an incident or ten. That's right people, let's block the entire domain so we can get rid of one or two measly hate blogs. Sheesh!

I don't have any patience with people who preach hatred, and I wouldn't mind beating the living daylights out of the blokes responsible for the bomb blasts either - it's my city, after all. But the fact remains - in order to stop people from seeing the hate blogs, they're also stopping them from seeing all the harmless ones. If it weren't so damn unconstitutional, I'd be laughing my ass off at this moronic measure.

Do they actually think that it's possible to stop a reasonably smart and net-savvy person from reading whatever they want on the net? The only way in hell they'll manage that is to shut down internet access completely. Otherwise, we geeks are unstoppable. Since I haven't given the government permission to censor my blog, it should bugger off and look very apologetic about it. And the next time it wants to do something like this, it had better come grovelling on its knees to the Indian Blogosphere, in abject humility and self-abasement. And even then we'll unanimously tell it to shove its lame fascist ideas where the sun don't shine.

Censorship in any form is just plain wrong. The government has no bloody right to tell its citizens what they can read or hear or say. I, for one, will never give them that right, and I spit on any and all of their attempts to do this. And the huge outburst from Indian bloggers all over the country shows that the rest of us won't either.

It will do the government(all democratic governments, actually) good to know one thing - the rights of the people are fundamental and granted by the nature of reality and the human condition. The rights of the government, however, are what the people say they are. The purpose of a government is to serve us, not rule us. It's a dog that should be kept on a very short leash. People in positions of power soon become intoxicated with it. And in India, we have incompetent people in positions of power, which leads to this sort of stupidity. *Sigh*...

As an act of respect to the Indian Constitution, I'm going to provide a bunch of links that show just how to defeat these silly restrictions.

This is a good summary of all the different ways to bypass the ban. Highly recommended.

Here's a list of ISPs that seem to be implementing the ban.

You can use a proxy, such as HideMyAss.

Another way is to go to Google's translation tools and ask it to translate the page you're reading. Unfortunately, Google doesn't have an English to English option :P, so you'll have to muck around with the URL a bit. Something like http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=abstractwhiz.blogspot.com might do the trick. However, this one seems to vary from ISP to ISP - some people can use it, and others can't. I've tried it, but the translation just goes on and on without ever appearing, so I wouldn't recommend it.

The Pakistani government has Blogspot blocked too, but a smart guy came up with an interesting solution - it's a website called pkblogs. You can get to my blog my going to http://www.pkblogs.com/abstractwhiz. There's now an Indian counterpart to it - Inblogs. I'm ashamed that India even needs one of these. So much for democracy, eh?

Let's see how long they can keep this ban up. Pretty soon, no one will even care. And while it's never gonna happen, it's still nice to hope that the government will apologize shamefacedly for making such a dumb mistake and publicly humiliate itself as punishment. :D