ONLINE BOOK SHOPING -PRO & CONS

Dear user almost all library automation software having the module of online book tarnsaction, apartfrom almost known book publisher/ vendor like AMAZON, ELSEVIER, SPRINGER OUP.CUP,PRENHALL, MACGRAHILL etc . THERE ARE ALSO NUMBER BOOK VENDORS
ADRESS GIVEN BELOW....
fabmall
http://www.fabmall.com
Atalanitc publisher and distributer
http://www.Atalaniticbook.com
Bagchhe .com
http://www.Bagchee.com
http://www.gobookshoping.com
first and second
http://www.firstandsecond.com
http://www.Jainbookagency.com
http://www.prakashbook.com
http://www.om-book.com
http://www.sapanaonline.com
HOW EVER ONLINE BOOK SHOPING HAS NUMBER OF LIMITATION
1- REQUIRED CREDIT CARD FOR LIBRARY
2- SECURE TRANSACTION SERVER WITH ENCRYPTION
3-PROPER VIGILANCE UPTO DELIVERY OF BOOK...

DISUCUSSION WILL BE MORE.......
PLZ.. COMMENT....siba

DATABASES

Databases
SciFinder Scholar
is a research discovery tool that allows college students and faculty to access a wide diversity of research from many scientific disciplines, including biomedical sciences, chemistry, engineering, materials science, agricultural science, and more! Demo SciFinderScholar SciFinderScholar Client

Engineering Village
is a Web-based information service that offers a wide range of quality resources for information specialists, professionals, and researchers working in the applied science and engineering fields. Quick Guide Go to Engineering Village2
JCCC is J-Gate Custom
Content for a group of homogeneous consortia members, and JCCC-INDEST is J-Gate Custom Content for the Indian National Digital Library in Science and Technology (INDEST), a consortium set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, India. Go to http://jccc-indest.informindia.co.in/about/about.asp
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources. It’s designed to find the information scientists need. Quick, easy and comprehensive, Scopus provides superior support of the literature research process.You can spend less time mastering databases and more time on research.It has 33 million abstracts as of now Scopus Demo .Go to Scopus
MathSciNet covers research in mathematics and mathematically related research in statistics, computer science, physics, operations research, engineering, biology, and other disciplines, and indexes 1800 serials and journals.

MathSciNet

covers research in mathematics and mathematically related research in statistics, computer science, physics, operations research, engineering, biology, and other disciplines, and indexes 1800 serials and journals. demo

http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/search.html

Why Use ProQuest databases?
ProQuest provides access to full-text articles on a variety of subjects. The Library subscribes to the following:
ABI/INFORM Academic Research Library ProQuest Dissertations and Theses ProQuest Education Journals ProQuest Historical Newspapers
ProQuest Religion ProQuest Social Science Journals U.S. National Newspapers Abstracts

http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ssah/useits/proquest.html#how

PLZ... COMMENT ME ON BUSINESS MANGEMENT DATABASES

creating instiutional repository with newgenlib

CrossRef : INFORMATION AT A CLICK...

CrossRef is an official Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Registration Agency. It was launched in early 2000 as a cooperative effort among publishers to enable cross-publisher citation linking in online academic journals. To date, CrossRef is the most robust implementation of the DOI model. It now interlinks millions of items from a variety of content types, including journals, books, working papers, technical reports, and datasets.
The expense is paid for by the journal publishers. Initially, there was some resistance from publishers who did not want to link to articles published by some other publisher, but by now every major academic publisher uses the system to their mutual advantage. It is also possible for users to search for articles directly from the CrossRef website.
The core CrossRef system was built by Atypon

OPEN URL... ;- NEW WAY ACCESS INFORMATION.

OpenURL is a type of URL that contains resource metadata for use primarily in libraries. The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has developed OpenURL and its data container (the ContextObject) as international ANSI standard Z39.88. On 22 June 2006, OCLC was named the maintenance agency for the standard.[1]
The OpenURL standard is designed to support mediated linking from information resources (sources) to library services (targets). A "link resolver", or "link-server", parses the elements of an OpenURL and provides links to appropriate services as identified by a library. A source is generally a bibliographic citation or bibliographic record used to generate an OpenURL. A target is a resource or service that helps satisfy user's information needs. Examples include full-text repositories; abstracting, indexing, and citation databases; online library catalogs; and other Web resources and services.
An OpenURL consists of a base URL, which addresses the user's institutional link-server, and a query string, which contains contextual data, typically in the form of key-value pairs. The contextual data is most often bibliographic data, but in version 1.0 of OpenURL can also include information about the requester, the resource containing the hyperlink, the type of service required, and so forth. For example:
http://resolver.example.edu/cgi?genre=book&isbn=0836218310&title=The+Far+Side+Gallery+3
is a version 0.1 OpenURL describing a book. http://resolver.example.edu/cgi is the base URL of an example link-server. In version 1.0, this same link becomes somewhat longer:
http://resolver.example.edu/cgi?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:book&rft.isbn=0836218310&rft.btitle=The+Far+Side+Gallery+3
The most common application of OpenURL is to provide appropriate copy resolution: an OpenURL link points to the copy of the resource most appropriate to the context of the request. If a different context is expressed in the query, a different copy ends up resolved to; but the change in context is predictable, and does not require the creator of the hyperlink to handcraft different URLs for different contexts. For instance, changing either the base URL or a requester parameter in the query string can mean that the OpenURL resolves to a copy of a resource in a different library. So the same OpenURL, contained for instance in an electronic journal, can be adjusted by either library to provide access to their own copy of the resource, without completely overwriting the journal's hyperlink. The journal provider in turn is no longer required to provide a different version of the journal, with different hyperlinks, for each subscribing library.
OpenURL was originated by Herbert van de Sompel, a librarian at the University of Ghent. His link-server software, SFX, was purchased by the library automation company Ex Libris which popularized OpenURL in the information industry. Many other companies now market link server systems, including Openly Informatics (1Cate — acquired by OCLC in 2006; rebranded as WorldCat Link Manager in 2007), Swets (SwetsWise Linker), Serials Solutions 360 Link (formerly known as Article Linker), Innovative Interfaces, Inc. (WebBridge), EBSCO (LinkSource), Ovid (LinkSolver), SirsiDynix (Resolver), Fretwell-Downing (OL2), TDNet (TOUR), R.R. Bowker (Ulrichs Resource Linker) and Infor (Vlink).
OpenURL is usually implemented by information providers by dynamically inserting an appropriate base URL into web pages sent to an authenticated user. OpenURL COinS is a new specification that allows free services like Wikipedia to provide OpenURLs by cooperating with client side software agents. Federated search software presents OpenURL links in record fields by employing the library's subscriber links to link servers facilitating access to full-text resources from bibliographic record hyperlinks.

What is the Connection Between Blended Librarianship and Information Literacy?

Between Blended Librarianship and Information Literacy?

watch the vedio learn with entertainment....
http://blendedlibrarian.org/Instructional%20Technology_56k.wmv

BIG B BLOG

Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan has turned blogger with bigadda.Com, a youth networking site, to connect with his fans worldwide.
Speaking about his new initiative, Bachchan said, "bigb.Bigadda.Com allows me to express myself, share and reflect my emotions, thoughts, opinions and listen to what people have to say to me and show them the 'real' side to my larger than life image that they see through media. It's a platform which I control and share my own drama without anyone editing or interpreting my thoughts."
What's most important for me is that I can now share consequential replies to the inconsequential gossip that do the rounds, says Amitabh Bachchan."What's most important for me is that I can now share consequential replies to the inconsequential gossip that do the rounds. I have always wanted a platform, where I can speak, for truth is always stranger than fiction. People will now be able to get an unedited version of my views, ideas and thoughts, straight from me," he said.
The actor added, "My adda (http://bigb.Bigadda.Com) will be the single point destination where I will openly state my views and also discuss the same with all."Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan has turned blogger with bigadda.Com, a youth networking site, to connect with his fans worldwide.
Speaking about his new initiative, Bachchan said, "bigb.Bigadda.Com allows me to express myself, share and reflect my emotions, thoughts, opinions and listen to what people have to say to me and show them the 'real' side to my larger than life image that they see through media. It's a platform which I control and share my own drama without anyone editing or interpreting my thoughts."
What's most important for me is that I can now share consequential replies to the inconsequential gossip that do the rounds, says Amitabh Bachchan."What's most important for me is that I can now share consequential replies to the inconsequential gossip that do the rounds. I have always wanted a platform, where I can speak, for truth is always stranger than fiction. People will now be able to get an unedited version of my views, ideas and thoughts, straight from me," he said.
The actor added, "My adda (http://bigb.Bigadda.Com) will be the single point destination where I will openly state my views and also discuss the same with all."

Blogs and Bollywood: The new relationship

Innovation in promoting films is becoming the name of the game in Bollywood. Blogging is the new tool. It is now no longer an exclusive method that only journalists and software geeks employ; it is fast being adopted by film stars and filmmakers to promote their movies.
For those new to the Internet, a blog, short for web log, can be described as a sort of online diary that can be viewed by all- like web pages.
From Aamir Khan to Rani Mukherjee and even Amitabh Bachchan, they have all entered chat rooms and blog spaces to woo fans all across the globe.
"Blogs are reaching new communities, larger bases and Bollywood is one of them. Since it is a medium for communication, it is a big opportunity for entertainment," says Krishna Prasad, Head, Programming, MSN India.

CITECEER-x

is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeerx aims to improve the dissemination of scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge.
Rather than creating just another digital library, CiteSeerx attempts to provide resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques, and software that can be used to promote other digital libraries. CiteSeerx indexes PostScript and PDF research articles on the Web, and provides the following features.
Features

Place your mouse over the orange arrows to view the details for each CiteSeer feature.
Autonomous Citation Indexing (ACI) CiteSeer uses ACI to automatically create a citation index that can be used for literature search and evaluation. Compared to traditional citation indices, ACI provides improvements in cost, availability, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness.
Citation statistics CiteSeer computes citation statistics and related documents for all articles cited in the database, not just the indexed articles.
Reference linking As with many online publishers, CiteSeer allows browsing the database using citation links. However, CiteSeer performs this automatically.
Citation context CiteSeer can show the context of citations to a given paper, allowing a researcher to quickly and easily see what other researchers have to say about an article of interest.
Awareness and tracking CiteSeer provides automatic notification of new citations to given papers, and new papers matching a user profile.
Related documents CiteSeer locates related documents using citation and word based measures and displays an active and continuously updated bibliography for each document.
Full-text indexing CiteSeer indexes the full-text of the entire articles and citations. Full boolean, phrase and proximity search is supported.
Query-sensitive summaries CiteSeer provides the context of how query terms are used in articles instead of a generic summary, improving the efficiency of search.
Up-to-date CiteSeer is regularly updated based on user submissions and regular crawls.
Powerful search CiteSeer uses fielded search to all complex queries over content, and allows the use of author initials to provide more flexible name search.
Harvesting of articles CiteSeer automatically harvests research papers from the Web.
Metadata of articles CiteSeer automatically extracts and provides metadata from all indexed articles.
Personal Content Portal Personal collections, RSS-like notifications, social bookmarking, social network facilities. Personalized search settings. Institutional data tracking possible. Transparent document submission system.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/

Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal

A guy starts a clever blog in January and calls it Stuff White People Like. The site contains a list of cultural totems, including gifted children, marathons and writers’ workshops, that a certain type of moneyed and liberal American might be expected to like.
“The No. 1 reason why white people like not having a TV,” reads the explanation under entry No. 28, Not Having a TV, “is so that they can tell you that they don’t have a TV.”
Readers discover stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, like it and forward links to their friends, who forward them to lots more friends. Newspaper columnists mention it, stealing — er, quoting — some of the better jokes. By the end of February, the NPR program “Talk of the Nation” runs a report on it, debating whether the site is racist or satire.
And then on March 20 Random House announces that it has purchased the rights to a book by the blog’s founder, Christian Lander, an Internet copy writer. The price, according to a source familiar with the deal but not authorized to discuss the total, was about $300,000, a sum that many in the publishing and blogging communities believe is an astronomical amount for a book spawned from a blog, written by a previously unpublished author.
“I was shocked and amazed that they got that much money for a concept that Martin Mull had written a book on back in 1985,” said Ron Hogan, who writes GalleyCat, a blog about the publishing industry. He was referring to “The History of White People in America,” by Mr. Mull and Allen Rucker, which mined its comedy from stereotypes about WASPs, noting that the term “white sex” was a contradiction akin to “towering miniseries.”
Mr. Lander’s more yuppified targets presumably like sex just fine — especially if sex is with Asian women, whom 95 percent of white men have dated or wanted to date at some point, he notes in No. 11, Asian Girls.
There was an innocent time, oh, about four years ago, when the idea of turning a blog into a book seemed novel, a fresh path for unknown writers to break into the big time.
The outcry over Mr. Lander’s book deal suggests the trend that has been building for a half decade may have finally reached apogee.
One of the first literary agents to troll the Web for talent was Kate Lee, who in 2003 was an assistant at International Creative Management, the sprawling talent agency, looking for a way to make her name.
When she started contacting bloggers and talking to them about book deals, many were stunned that a real literary agent was interested in their midnight typings. Her roster was so rich with bloggers, including Matt Welch from Hit & Run and Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, that the New Yorker profiled her in 2004. Two years from now, the magazine noted, “Books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon.”
And two years after that?
“If I contact someone or someone is put in touch with me, chances are they’ve already been contacted by another agent,” Ms. Lee said. “Or they’ve at least thought about turning their blog into a book or some kind of film or TV project.”
Mr. Lander, for one, was scooped up by Erin Malone, an agent with William Morris.
On March 7, the daily e-mail newsletter Very Short List lauded his site.
That same day, Ms. Malone contacted Kurt Andersen, a founder of Very Short List who is also represented by the William Morris agency and who is an adviser to Random House. He had seen Stuff White People Like and liked it.
Ms. Malone told Mr. Andersen she was planning to circulate a White People book proposal for bids the next day, he said. The agent asked him to bring it to the attention of Gina Centrello, the president and publisher of Random House.
“I sent an e-mail to Gina saying, ‘I think this thing is smart and good. Just letting you know they’re sending out a book proposal tomorrow,’ ” Mr. Andersen said.
Mr. Andersen is a good friend to have. Although there were many bidders, Random House prevailed and announced the deal on March 20.
Mr. Andersen said what impressed him about White People’s prospects as a book is that it was already sort of unbloglike. The site is not chockablock with links to other material, but with what amounts to a series of daily essays. “It’s more like a book he’s putting out serially on the Web,” Mr. Andersen said. On his blog, Mr. Lander pledged that the book will be mostly new material not on the Web site.
Barbara Fillon, a Random House spokeswoman, said her office mates were laughing about the content on White People for weeks before they heard there was a book proposal in the offing.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/fashion/30web.

IIT CLASSES ON YOUTUBE

How does it feel to attend classes in India’s most sought-after institution? Find out on YouTube. For the last month, 13 video courses in science and engineering of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) have been on free trial runs on YouTube . So, you can sit inAhmedabad or Amsterdam and login in to 40 streaming hours of IIT classroom teaching video. Even classes at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, will get on YouTube soon.

http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=nptelhrd

Yahoo joins Google's OpenSocial

NEW YORK: Yahoo Inc said that it was joining rival Google Inc's initiative for creating photo-sharing and other social tools that work across the Web.
News Corp's MySpace earlier pledged support, and the three companies announced that they were forming a non-profit organisation, the OpenSocial Foundation, to ensure that the platform remains neutral and viable. The idea behind the Google-initiated OpenSocial platform is to create a common coding standard for the applications so they work on hundreds of websites. The applications could permit chats, games, media sharing and more. By contrast, sites that haven't joined OpenSocial typically rely on unique coding that has prevented widgets developed for its sites from working at other places on the Web. The addition of Yahoo could put pressure on Facebook, the No. 2 social-networking site behind MySpace, to pledge support as well, though Facebook has had tremendous success encouraging developers to write tools specifically for it. Other participants in OpenSocial include Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, the Google-owned Orkut and Bebo, which Time Warner Inc's AOL is planning to buy for $850 million. In a company blog entry, Yahoo Vice President Wade Chambers said the company was joining OpenSocial now because "it's no longer a trial balloon -- it's for real." Chambers said Yahoo wanted to make developers feel confident about using OpenSocial as a building block for future social applications. By creating a non-profit to oversee OpenSocial, effective July 1, the companies want to ensure that intellectual property assets will remain available to everyone. The companies said the foundation also would provide transparency and guidelines around technical and legal issues as the platform evolves. http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2900323.cms

INTOLERANT INDIA - BY SHASHI THAROR

Is India becoming a playground for the intolerant? The evidence is mounting that it is. Jodhaa Akbar cannot be screened in Rajasthan because some Rajputs have taken umbrage at the heroine's name. Sania Mirza has court cases slapped against her for resting her foot too close to a national flag; Richard Gere for resting his lips too close to Shilpa Shetty's. Viking Penguin has been served a legal notice because Jaishree Misra's historical novel on the Rani of Jhansi actually treats her as a human being. Our most famous living artist, M F Husain, is living in exile because he fears harassment if he returns to his own country — at an age where he should be able to live with love and honour in his homeland. An exhibition in Chennai on Aurangzeb is shut down after protests by Muslims claiming it misrepresents the mediaeval emperor. Taslima Nasreen, a persecuted author to whom India had given asylum, has now fled the country, her peace of mind and health broken by the relentless hounding of fundamentalist Muslims and the cravenness of both the West Bengal and Indian governments. Where is our society heading? The rise of illiberality reflects a breakdown in our national consensus on the limits of the permissible. Some Indians feel strongly that in our culture, freedom comes with responsibilities, and that untrammelled freedom of expression carries risks of social and political disruption that should not be allowed. The example of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed is often cited; not just India, but few governments hosting significant Muslim populations would be happy to permit the publication of material so derogatory as to offend and provoke a large segment of the people. We all know the famous American dictum that freedom of speech does not include the freedom to falsely shout 'fire' in a crowded theatre. Similarly, your freedom to move your fist stops just short of my face. Such restraints are obvious, and no reasonable advocate of freedom of the press would seek absolute freedom for the media, unconstrained by the well-being of the society in which it flourishes. But there is a world of difference between accepting this principle and implementing it reasonably. Societies are self-correcting mechanisms; when the press goes too far, it rapidly discovers the limits for itself. The press everywhere adopts the restraints appropriate for its social environment; no American newspaper, for instance, would print the so-called 'n' word when referring to black Americans — not because the government disallows it but because the editors are conscious of what is the decent and socially acceptable thing to do. Indian editors are capable of the same judgements, as they demonstrated during the episode of the Danish cartoons. Leaving governments to decide what is reasonable and responsible substitutes the judgement of the authorities for the judgement of the media, and so jeopardises press freedom. But leaving it to unelected and unaccountable bigots — to whose uneducated opposition our governments cave in all too easily — is even worse. It's not just an Indian problem. The arrest last year of a cartoonist in Bangladesh and the suspension of publication of the leading Bengali weekly, Prathom Alo — over a cartoon that sought to satirise not the Prophet but the social custom of naming everybody after the Prophet — is a disturbing example of this. If restraints are expected, fine; but if that means giving free license to the most intolerant elements of a society to censor ideas that are not in themselves blasphemous, then we are all in trouble. Asians are all too quick to make the argument that Asian societies are not European ones, and that not every standard applicable in Europe can be transplanted wholesale to Asia. But most Asians are capable of understanding a joke in the spirit in which it was intended. Such actions as Bangladesh's merely empower the humourless, whose agenda has little to do with society as it exists but everything to do with the society they wish to create, one in which people of their political persuasion will prevail. But India is not Bangladesh. It is shameful that in a democracy like ours, we have become so vulnerable to the pressure of the mob — that those who claim they are offended prevail over those who seek to exercise their freedom of expression. Today, in our country, it seems the ultra-sensitive are making the rules. It is high time that civil society stood up for the tolerance on which our entire civilisation has rested for millennia — allowing different forms of expression and ideas to flourish undisturbed, rather than allowing the easily offended to dictate terms to us. We should say to those whose outrage is easily sparked: if you're irked by scantily clad ladies on a fashion channel, watch some other channel; if you don't like Taslima Nasreen's book, read some other book. But don't try to persecute her for writing a book that you don't want to read. Yet, we don't say that. We've allowed the narrow-minded to set the terms of the debate, partly because our governments, of whatever political hue, lack the courage to assert the values embedded in our own Constitution. To the cravenness of politicians, anxious not to alienate every little vote bank, must be added the pusillanimity of the elite, who fear that somehow the protestors are more authentically desi in their outrage than we are in our liberality. But, in fact, it is tolerance that is the most authentic Indian tradition; as Amartya Sen has shown, the spirit of allowing assorted heterodoxies to flourish is deeply rooted in our country's soil. Every time we give in to the forces of intolerance, we are betraying that tradition. We are letting ourselves down as a civilisation.

INTOLERANT INDIA - BY SHASHI THAROR

Is India becoming a playground for the intolerant? The evidence is mounting that it is. Jodhaa Akbar cannot be screened in Rajasthan because some Rajputs have taken umbrage at the heroine's name. Sania Mirza has court cases slapped against her for resting her foot too close to a national flag; Richard Gere for resting his lips too close to Shilpa Shetty's. Viking Penguin has been served a legal notice because Jaishree Misra's historical novel on the Rani of Jhansi actually treats her as a human being. Our most famous living artist, M F Husain, is living in exile because he fears harassment if he returns to his own country — at an age where he should be able to live with love and honour in his homeland. An exhibition in Chennai on Aurangzeb is shut down after protests by Muslims claiming it misrepresents the mediaeval emperor. Taslima Nasreen, a persecuted author to whom India had given asylum, has now fled the country, her peace of mind and health broken by the relentless hounding of fundamentalist Muslims and the cravenness of both the West Bengal and Indian governments. Where is our society heading? The rise of illiberality reflects a breakdown in our national consensus on the limits of the permissible. Some Indians feel strongly that in our culture, freedom comes with responsibilities, and that untrammelled freedom of expression carries risks of social and political disruption that should not be allowed. The example of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed is often cited; not just India, but few governments hosting significant Muslim populations would be happy to permit the publication of material so derogatory as to offend and provoke a large segment of the people. We all know the famous American dictum that freedom of speech does not include the freedom to falsely shout 'fire' in a crowded theatre. Similarly, your freedom to move your fist stops just short of my face. Such restraints are obvious, and no reasonable advocate of freedom of the press would seek absolute freedom for the media, unconstrained by the well-being of the society in which it flourishes. But there is a world of difference between accepting this principle and implementing it reasonably. Societies are self-correcting mechanisms; when the press goes too far, it rapidly discovers the limits for itself. The press everywhere adopts the restraints appropriate for its social environment; no American newspaper, for instance, would print the so-called 'n' word when referring to black Americans — not because the government disallows it but because the editors are conscious of what is the decent and socially acceptable thing to do. Indian editors are capable of the same judgements, as they demonstrated during the episode of the Danish cartoons. Leaving governments to decide what is reasonable and responsible substitutes the judgement of the authorities for the judgement of the media, and so jeopardises press freedom. But leaving it to unelected and unaccountable bigots — to whose uneducated opposition our governments cave in all too easily — is even worse. It's not just an Indian problem. The arrest last year of a cartoonist in Bangladesh and the suspension of publication of the leading Bengali weekly, Prathom Alo — over a cartoon that sought to satirise not the Prophet but the social custom of naming everybody after the Prophet — is a disturbing example of this. If restraints are expected, fine; but if that means giving free license to the most intolerant elements of a society to censor ideas that are not in themselves blasphemous, then we are all in trouble. Asians are all too quick to make the argument that Asian societies are not European ones, and that not every standard applicable in Europe can be transplanted wholesale to Asia. But most Asians are capable of understanding a joke in the spirit in which it was intended. Such actions as Bangladesh's merely empower the humourless, whose agenda has little to do with society as it exists but everything to do with the society they wish to create, one in which people of their political persuasion will prevail. But India is not Bangladesh. It is shameful that in a democracy like ours, we have become so vulnerable to the pressure of the mob — that those who claim they are offended prevail over those who seek to exercise their freedom of expression. Today, in our country, it seems the ultra-sensitive are making the rules. It is high time that civil society stood up for the tolerance on which our entire civilisation has rested for millennia — allowing different forms of expression and ideas to flourish undisturbed, rather than allowing the easily offended to dictate terms to us. We should say to those whose outrage is easily sparked: if you're irked by scantily clad ladies on a fashion channel, watch some other channel; if you don't like Taslima Nasreen's book, read some other book. But don't try to persecute her for writing a book that you don't want to read. Yet, we don't say that. We've allowed the narrow-minded to set the terms of the debate, partly because our governments, of whatever political hue, lack the courage to assert the values embedded in our own Constitution. To the cravenness of politicians, anxious not to alienate every little vote bank, must be added the pusillanimity of the elite, who fear that somehow the protestors are more authentically desi in their outrage than we are in our liberality. But, in fact, it is tolerance that is the most authentic Indian tradition; as Amartya Sen has shown, the spirit of allowing assorted heterodoxies to flourish is deeply rooted in our country's soil. Every time we give in to the forces of intolerance, we are betraying that tradition. We are letting ourselves down as a civilisation.