Credit for the following to person(s) of unknown origin – I am NOT the author of the post that follows, although I agree with almost all of that which has been said.

Traveling on Indian roads is an almost hallucinatory potion of sound, spectacle and experience. It is frequently heart-rending, sometimes hilarious, mostly exhilarating, always unforgettable — and, when you are on the roads, extremely dangerous.

Most Indian road users observe a version of the Highway Code based on a Sanskrit text. These rules of the Indian road are published for the first time in English:

* ARTICLE I:

The assumption of immortality is required of all road users.

* ARTICLE II:

Indian traffic, like Indian society,is structured on a strict caste system. The following precedence must be accorded at all times. In descending order, give way to:
* Cows, elephants, heavy trucks, buses, official cars, camels, light trucks, buffalo, jeeps, ox-carts, private cars, motorcycles, scooters, auto-rickshaws, pigs, pedal rickshaws, goats, bicycles (goods-carrying), handcarts, bicycles (passenger-carrying), dogs, pedestrians.

* ARTICLE III:

All wheeled vehicles shall be driven in accordance with the maxim: to slow is to falter, to brake is to fail, to stop is defeat. This is the Indian drivers’ mantra.

* ARTICLE IV:

Use of horn (also known as the sonic fender or aural amulet):
* Cars (IV,1,a-c):
1. Short blasts (urgent) indicate supremacy, IE in clearing dogs, rickshaws and pedestrians from path.
2. Long blasts (desperate) denote supplication, IE to oncoming truck: “I am going too fast to stop, so unless you slow down we shall both die”. In extreme cases this may be accompanied by flashing of headlights (frantic).
3. Single blast (casual) means: “I have seen someone out of India’s 870 million whom I recognise”, “There is a bird in the road (which at this speed could go through my windscreen)” or “I have not blown my horn for several minutes.”

* Trucks and buses (IV,2,a):

All horn signals have the same meaning, viz: “I have an all-up weight of approximately 12.5 tons and have no intention of stopping, even if I could.” This signal may be emphasised by the use of headlamps.

Article IV remains subject to the provision of Order of Precedence in Article II above.

* ARTICLE V:

All manoeuvres, use of horn and evasive action shall be left until the last possible moment.

* ARTICLE VI:

In the absence of seat belts (which there is), car occupants shall wear garlands of marigolds. These should be kept fastened at all times.

* ARTICLE VII:
1. Rights of way:

Traffic entering a road from the left has priority. So has traffic from the right, and also traffic in  the middle.

2. Lane discipline (VII,1):

All Indian traffic at all times and irrespective of direction of travel shall occupy the centre of the road. This shall aid in the training of so many prospective pilots in their ground taxiing skills.

* ARTICLE VIII:

Roundabouts: India has no roundabouts. Apparent traffic islands in the middle of crossroads have no traffic management function. Any other impression should be ignored.

* ARTICLE IX:

Overtaking is mandatory. Every moving vehicle is required to overtake every other moving vehicle, irrespective of whether it has just overtaken you.

Overtaking should only be undertaken in suitable conditions, such as in the face of oncoming traffic, on blind bends, at junctions and in the middle of villages/city centres. No more than two inches should be allowed between your vehicle and the one you are passing — and one inch in the case of bicycles or pedestrians.

* ARTICLE X:

Nirvana may be obtained through the head-on crash.

* ARTICLE XI:

Reversing: no longer applicable since no vehicle in India has reverse gear

Carrying on this tradition, the Opera Mini browser is available for use on a wide variety of cell-phones. I currently use a Sony Ericsson K750i and the default WAP browser, which although usable is no match for Opera Mini. The latest version to roll off the coding line is OM v4.1.

Before I have a look at the features, a brief word on cell phone data plans. My service provider BPL Mobile (Mumbai) offers two GPRS plans:

• The one that I use is cheaper and allows for only WAP access, allowing me to access only sites written or optimised for viewing by WAP browsers (the default browser on most mobile devices).
• The other plan (Full GPRS access), which costs more, has no restrictions and allows all sort of data and socket connections to be made resulting in a much faster connection.

The beauty of Opera Mini is that it connects to its own servers over this low-speed WAP connection removes extra spaces and formatting and redisplays the full page so it fits your phone’s screen. No restrictions on WML only or WAP sites.

Too many features to list, but there’s support for SSL, so you can even perform secure transactions (although I wouldn’t recommend it if a PC option is available). Bookmarks and custom RSS feeds can be stored.

Navigation is a breeze especially if you have a joystick/four-way keypad. Page-wise scrolling is accomplished by moving the joystick left (Page Up) or right (Page Down). There’s support for cookies too, so if a site allows you to retain a login, you’ll be able to bypass entering your login credentials each time you visit.

Keyboard shortcuts take the chore out of having to navigate thru the menus. There are shortcuts for jumping to bookmarked sites (* + number) and for performing common tasks like reloading a page, moving to the top/bottom, viewing the history etc. (# + number). If you forget a particular number, just wait a second or two and a helpful reference screen will pop up.

Opera Mini also has a neat photo blogging feature which allows a person to take a picture from the phone camera and upload it to the Opera Mini Photo Blog. You’ll need to register to set up an account first.

Saving content off a page is also considerably easy with OM’s ability to download files and images from links shown on the page. One can also zoom in to certain areas of an image for a closer look.

VERDICT: It works extremely well, is hugely useful and will make you forget your other browser. Get it. Quickly.

Let me however, try to break things down into a simpler format – First, setting apart the personification applied as to whether an inanimate collection of electronically linked devices can actually be thought to have characteristics that can be termed as “malevolent” (or just plain evil to you and me),let’s start by asking who the most likely people would be to think of this as a true likelihood…

The Internet is all about sharing information; it was built essentially to share information between various organisations. Information, thus used is usually termed to be knowledge and having knowledge, as is oft-quoted, is said to be having power. Leaving the philosophical discussion about the inherent risks associated with power and responsibility (didn’t I see that in a super-hero movie sometime?), I’ll focus on the factor that all of us know for a fact can possibly be categorized as “evil” – people. It’s the people using the internet to create and distribute obscene content, malicious applications and the like. It’s the people who try to track your online movements and then serve you advertisements for products and services that you certainly don’t need. It’s the public servant who no longer can enforce his price-list of bribes in order to carry out your work thanks to online procedures and transparency, who thinks the Internet to be evil. It’s your local post office and the lazy hypothetical postman who now thinks twice before delaying your “Speed Post” package, by saying it’s stuck in transit, while you know thanks to Internet tracking that the package has already reached the post office – he’s one of the ever increasing band of people terming the Net evil for trying to increase his efficiency. And what about the sniveling touts that greet you outside every Railway Ticket Reservation Centre – the Internet has put paid to a heavy chunk of their income obtained by falsely telling passengers that seats weren’t available while half the train would roll out empty.

The above are just a small slice of the pie of people who think that the Net is evil. Why then do so many of us when asked our first impression of the Internet, think that it’s nothing more than a cesspool of scams, obscene and pornographic content and a place that allows terrorists to secretly exchange messages? Perhaps because it is so or it is just human nature to search for and lock on to the black spot in a white kerchief.

The Internet as it currently stands is nothing more than an extension to the happenings in the real-world. Human nature is an extremely complex set of concepts. What worries some one will more likely than not be just fine for the person sitting next to them. I personally have seen a middle-aged man, buying a magazine with adult content. None of our so called moral police object to that. I fail to see how the medium of distribution rather than the content itself comes under fire.

I need to clarify something which might not be understood by all and at once – there lies a difference, albeit a subtle one, between the evils of the Internet and the Internet being evil itself. As in life, I have heard of stories that warm a geek’s heart like that of people being re-united after being separated for lifetimes thanks to contact established via the Net. Fundraising for many a worthy cause as opposed to the steady stream of fictitious dollars being pumped out of most African nations (if someone were daft enough to believe the content of those emails).

It’s a firm belief of mine and some may say that I belong to a dying breed that as in life itself, the online world must be watched. Online freedoms must be protected as they are in the real world. A pre-condition though does exist as ably described by the Roman poet Decimus Junius Juvenalis:

“Quis costodiet ipsos custodes?”

Who will watch the watchers?