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Wed, May-16-2012, 12:00

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Indians in general, and its leaders in particular, seem to be losing their sense of humour as noted below.

Are Indian netas humourless?
John B. Monteiro

 I don t think cartoons are only for kids, but I think kids will love anything as long as it’s visually interesting.
 - John Kricfalusi

Cartoonists are at the receiving end of people’s ire, lead by political leaders whose bloated egos are often punctured by cartoonists. In Iran, a cartoonist was recently condemned to receive 30 lashes in public. In India even parliamentarians have risen to attack cartoons and cartoonists. The background on this and the implications are well rounded up in an article titled Censors In the House by Ronojoy Sen, a visiting research fellow at ISAS, National University of Singapore, and published in The Times of India (16-5-12) and excerpted here.

Should airbrushing be banned?
John B Monteiro

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Anon.

Now there need not be beauty ; it is manipulated by using technology. As Gillian Orr points out in an article titled The teens taking on airbrushing in The Independent, digitally altered images of impossibly perfect models are a familiar sites in ads and magazines. But a new generation is talking tough on retouching or photo-shopping as noted in the following excerpts from Gillian’s article

In the latest edition of Seventeen, the go-to US magazine for teenage girls since 1944, models with flawless skin, glossy locks and tiny waists adorn page after page. While the girls pictured are certainly blessed in the beauty department, it’s also evident that airbrushing has played a part in each and every spread. We’ve come to accept that this is standard practice across these magazines but Julia Bluhm, a 14-year-old schoolgirl from Maine, has had enough of it. Recently Bluhm and other likeminded teens staged a protest outside the New York offices of Seventeen’s publisher, Hearst Corporation, and delivered a petition urging them to print at least one unaltered feature a month.

Will same sex marriage go viral?
John B. Monteiro

Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same sex partners to marry diminish the marriage of heterosexual couples? – Ted Olson.

Same sex marriage has been the subject of controversy and debate. The subject has acquired a new focus with President Barak Obama  endorsing it on May 9, 2012. The issues involved are put into perspective by Adam Nagourney in an article in The New York Times under the title “For Obama, the move is both risky & inevitable” – and excerpted here. Apart from Obama’s  personal impact, will his stand make the same sex marriage a global rage?