In the list, seven were Right-wing American sites. Some of these contain considerable anti-Islamic venom of the Holy Book-flushing kind, but in the post-9/11 world you will find so many such webpages that it is practically impossible to block them all. They also blocked three NRI Hindutvawaadi sites.[Via Desipundit.] The government's incompetence and high-handedness has invited international outrage and scorn. Meanwhile, The Hindu published the actually letter that Indian ISPs received last year (pdf link). It's hilarious. As has been pointed out, it gets a lot of the domain names wrong. How incompetent can one get? The letter, complete with slightly smudgy type and long, complicated serial number, evokes a desk in a dusty government office somewhere, surrounded by cups of chai, with a creaking ceiling fan and paan-chewing, rude babus in khakhi uniforms lolling about swatting flies. No doubt, the letter was birthed in triplicate, to feed the ever-hungry files, still tied together by bits of cotton twine, whose movements resemble the intestinal peristalsis of some long extinct mammoth.
Some of these sites are now thanking the Indian government for bringing them into the news and increasing their traffic. How do I know this? Simple: I can still read those sites via anonymisers like anonymouse.org. Let’s get this straight, once and for all: you can’t ban anything on the net.
Anyway, whatever Sarkar might do, there's apparently eighteen million people in India who read blogs. Wowzer. Keep it up, peeps! :)
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