[Reader-list] Corporations Out of My Hair! or ‘Mairay Pochchu!’

[Anivar Aravind]

Excellent piece by Satya

http://thefishpond.in/satya/2009/mairay-pochchu/
</snip>
‘Scientists discover way to convert human hair into high grade fuel’
read the innocuous looking news item tucked away in a corner of the
technology pages of my daily newspaper.

At first I didn’t take it seriously and thought it was another
self-promoting piece of propaganda from some corporate biotech lab
somewhere. Little did I realize this was the beginning of a most
bizarre series of events.

If human hair was going to be a valuable commodity in the near or even
distant future, every major corporation in the world wanted as much of
it as possible. BP, Shell, Exxon-Mobil – announced they were happy
that what they had been mining from under the ground all these decades
could be replaced by something on top of everyone’s head.

Joining them in the race for ‘strategic control’ of human hair were
the mining giants De Beers, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, while Indian
multinationals like Reliance, Tata and the Mittal group demanded the
government declare Indian hair be reserved solely for domestic
companies.

If corporations sought it so much, politicians naturally wanted to
become their middlemen, mortgaging their country’s annual output of
hair. The Indian government rushed to declare hair as ‘state
property’, banning all barbers from practising their profession and
directing citizens to have their haircuts in designated ‘inlets’.
Cabinet ministers were exempted, but several turned up in Parliament
with logos of global corporations proudly stamped across their bald
pates. After all these days one is known only by the company that
keeps you and not by the company you keep.

</snip>

Read More:  http://thefishpond.in/satya/2009/mairay-pochchu/


-- 
"[It is not] possible to distinguish between 'numerical' and
'nonnumerical' algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from
other kinds of precise information." - Donald Knuth