Blocking the Blog

State of the art! This is the response you would get if you asked any of the Indian ISPs about their technology & equipment. But this term surely does not apply to their management and employees. How else would you justify the blanket blockage of the blogspot, geocities and other domains?? The recent ban on the blogging sites show that they have gone totally overboard and blocked entire domains instead of specific blogs. How difficult is it to block a handful of URLs mentioned by the Government? It looks like the ISPs have employed worthless idiots who either do not know their job or are too lazy to take the effort and have taken the easy way out. I remember another incident more than a year ago when, acting on Government instructions, they blocked Yahoo Groups in India. The motive was to block a few offending mailing lists! No lessons seem to have been learnt from that episode, it seems!!

Of course, at this point I must also invove the honourable Government of India which is so much like the police in Bollywood movies - showing up after a fight is over, to pick up the pieces. If the Govt. was really serious about preventing inflammatory and communal messages from being spread around, the blockage of the offending sites should have been done long ago! What is the point in going into a paranoid mode now and banning things left, right and center? What would be blocked next? Email? Cellphones? the Internet?? It is really strange that even though we are in a democracy, we are beginning to see Government censorship and control on the lines of China and North Korea!

The need of the hour is to use these technologies to spread the word of peace around and not to ban things! Instilling confidence in the people in times like these would be more constructive rather than adopting a defensive posture and showing that we are running scared from a handful of madmen.