Monday 27 May 2013

Opening Blog for GSoC 2013

HI!

    I am too euphoric right now to tell you that I got selected for Google Summer of Code 2013.
I shall be working on 'Refactoring of Proofread Page Extension' which is a Wikimedia project.
The best part is that I met some really wonderful people during the application process.

    I must thank Thibaut Horel, Thomas, Sumana Harihareswara and Quim Gil ( obviously all of them are Wikimedians ) for their support and guidance. If not for SDSLabs, I might not have been in the list of selected candidates. I can't mention everyone here so 'Thanks a lot SDSLabs! \m/'. This would have been much more difficult if I didn't have a friend like Shubhechyya.

Imp: Richa Jain, Abhishek Das also got selected for GSoC. So don't miss an opportunity to ask them for a chapo.

PS: I was a bit euphoric because of the news and made the mistake of writing 3013 instead of 2013. So, please excuse my mistake.

Thursday 16 May 2013

Rants Against Religion

Its been  a long time since I visited my blog! The last time an issue was so important to me that I wrote about it somewhere, it was concerned with the issue of objectification and degradation of women( http://qr.ae/Tq7UR ). For a change, this time I am not dealing directly with feminism. This time it is religion.

Religious books are not a new entity. A book cannot do much wrong if people have brains. I might sound arrogant but people today are dumb. Why do you need a book to tell you that it is not okay to hit your wife or why it is improper to be cruel? If the only thing that stops you from going on a killing spree is a goddamned book that tells you about heaven and hell, then you have a serious morality issues.

What a religious book tells you:
1. There is a guy( God ) who is invisible to everyone and omnipotent. He was bored so he created the universe.
2. Then Adam or some other guy( like Manu in Hindu mythology ) was created and he alone or with his consort was responsible for creating the human race.
3. Then another guy came along because humans became big time sinners. eg. Jesus came once but Hindu Gods keep taking avatars.
4. You have to follow these rituals, you have to fast during this duration or on particular days, you have to pray everyday or the guy will get angry and send you to hell.
5. So this is a set of values which should basically be common sense but only I can decide what is right and what is not and you all are too dumb to realise humanity.
6. Know what I am not awesome so I will just create a few differences and discrimination. So, you guys become Shudras, you guys become Brahmins blah, blah.. Kill the infidels.
7. I am not a woman and I fall for women too easily so I will dictate how a woman's body should be proportioned so that she looks good to me. Oops, another problem, I don't want women to be equal to men so I will ask them to cover up every last nanometer of their body. Yeah, tresses seduce me, so cover that up.
8. You must believe that I will help you. I know I am invisible but manipulative.
9. Kiss my feet.

Most people will find this offensive but this is what the religious books really are. The sad thing is even though they were written centuries ago people believe lies to be still relevant and follow it to their graves.

No book should ever assume that its readers are dumb and cannot decide for themselves. Of course, people are ignorant about certain things till they read a book. No book or person should decide for someone else until the person is not equipped to think. This is exactly what these books do.

When you read these books you tend to give up your belief in science and go looking for this mysterious guy. Yes, all religions have fundamentalists and moderates but the moderates did not stop the fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are a nice example of what happens when you read religious books blindly and too often.
Some people are religious and nice but most of the religious people are not what a human should be. They are blinded by religion and reason is their enemy. Why? Because God likes it this way.

Religion is a thousand minds gripped by the same idea.
- Author unknown to me.