On Tue, 2013-08-20 at 21:20 +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: > Groklaw has decided to shut shop. > > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130820/02152224249/more-nsa-spying-fallout-groklaw-shutting-down.shtml
Here's a quote from the above link: > The people talked about how it stopped them from being emotional with > their children or other close friends and relatives. How they had > trouble functioning in ways that many people take for granted, just > because the mental stress of knowing that you have absolutely no > privacy is incredibly burdensome. > > Privacy is a funny thing. In India, due to centuries of overcrowding and joint families, and the need to shit and pee out in the open, privacy as we tend to imagine it is largely absent. When I was a medical student in India I would examine patients in the open in a large room full of people (yes full - maybe 50 patients). The woman with a boil on her buttock would get some half torn screen while she raised her sari up to be examined. Of course medical education in India made me a "plug and play" doctor for the west and I slotted right in there in the UK without breaking my step, no sweat. It was India that took getting used to. Concepts of privacy that I knew about were practised in the UK and I enforced them with jihad like fervour in India. But I gradually discovered that in India it is normal for hangers about to stand and listen while I discuss a patient's piles with him and his relatives. I have relatives who grew up in families that lived in two room homes with 5 or 6 people rolling out mattresses from under a sofa or cot for the night and rolling them up in the morning. The famous Indian "sofa cum bed" is part of this lifestyle. My late mother grew up in her father's house with 4 siblings and 15 odd cousins. Privacy was non existent and this makes people grow up in a peculiar way. Everyone knows everything. You do not even fart in private. (pressurizing people to fart in private is a reprehensible act that should be condemned). Everyone knows everything about everyone else. What is treated in the west as sensitive information whose leakage could get a doctor sued is out in the open in India. So I wonder why people must worry about being emotional with children on email? What might it be that worries them? shiv
