OnPoint by Keith Ng

Delhi isn't really what I'd expected. For the capital of a supposed up-and-coming IT-superpower, it was pretty strange that it didn't even have a functional ATM at the airport (there was, however, one broken one). My GPRS phone worked the moment I turned it on, and I was downloading emails by the time we were driving through the slums that surrounded the airport.

There was the usual hoo-har. I'd booked a hotel close to the airport, which, as it turns out, meant "far from civilisation". My 12-year-old-looking taxi driver drove me down around a dozen dark, rat-infested, unpaved back alleys looking for my hotel. The only light not from us was from some guy lighting a fire in a barrel and his invisible companion who was a very good listener. As far as first impressions go, it wasn't so flash.

We arrived an hour later to be told that the room I booked wasn't booked, and that they had no room for me. More taxi-ing about. Deciding against more 3am back alley sheenagans, I picked a youth hostel close to the diplomatic enclave. Big wide roads, big fat signs, heavily armed soldiers giving him directions, and the new driver still got lost. I ended up having to give driving directions to him via my half-page Lonely Planet map - how the hell did people travel before it?

Got to bed around 5am. So, the usual hoo-har.

I'd expected Delhi to be hot, crowded and wired up - it's not. It was 10 degrees last night, I didn't even have to elbow anyone, and the only sign of the tech revolution is the ubiquitous cellphone - everything else is still pretty... loose.

I guess it's one of those things: Just because everybody uses the internet, has a cellphone and watches cable, it doesn't necessarily mean they're living like us.

Then there's the anarchic traffic system. Nothing like a bit of "OH FUCK I'M GOING TO DIE" in a gas-powered tuk-tuk to start the day. Of course, all this Mad-Maxary was nothing to the drivers; one was peacefully humming as he drove on the wrong side of the road, swerved to avoid people, drove at speed inches between two buses, etc.; another was eating shelled peanuts while driving - open vehicles are handy like that.

Took me two hours to get a cellphone - you need photo ID, photo, photocopy of photo ID, *then* you fill out three forms. But now I am connected to modern India.

The NZ Deputy High Commissioner Heather Ward was kind enough to host a lunch for me and a few Indian journalists, followed by a few meetings. It was a great introduction to India - talking about the trade tarrifs, the rural problems, politics, religion and everything else. It's a lot to take in for the first day.

I'll be heading down to Chennai next week, and will be in India for a while. Will be heading out to Bangalore on the 18th to see Jim Sutton, live. That'll be rockin'.

Would be great to get in touch with any readers in the neighbourhood - here in Delhi, in Chennai (where I'll be spending a lot of time), or even in Banglore, Hyderbad or Mumbai (I'll be moving around a bit).

Will write more (and hopefully better) when I'm more cogent.

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So... what about that Don Brash then? I hear he's not the National Party leader anymore.

Ahem. I think it's the jetlag. I've moved back about 300 timezones, so I'm a bit behind on the news.

But when I left, Fran O'Sullivan was comparing Hager with Nixon for stealing private correspondence, while everyone else was comparing Don Brash with Nixon for being forced out of office in disgrace when he was found out to be a bit of a tricky dick.

So, who's the real Dick, then?

That would have made a good title, but that was about as far as I got when I got on the plane, and it seems a tad redundant to write the rest of that post now. However, I would recommend the movie Dick, a very serious movie about Watergate starring Kristen Dunst and Michelle Williams.

Favourite quote - Michelle Williams screaming, in front of the Washington Memorial: "I love Dick!"

Heh heh. Political satire is deep. Heh heh. Deep.

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Meanwhile, here in Secret Pirate Island, aka Hong Kong, the election was held yesterday. Well, not like an election election, but an election for the Election Committee, which elects the Chief Executive (the head of the executive branch of government).

You political science geeks would love it.

The Election Committee has 800 members: 200 from the "industrial, commercial and financial sectors", 200 from "the professions", 200 from "labour, social services, religious and other sectors", and 200 from actual political bodies (the Hong Kong legislature, HK members of the National People's congress) etc.

So, essentially, each arbitrarily defined caste in Hong Kong gets a quarter of the votes. But ah - the actual representatives from these castes have to be elected, too. So each sector is divided into sub-sectors, and each sub-sector is allocated a certain number of seats from the 200, and they vote on their own candidates.

For example, all the social workers in Hong Kong would get to register as voters in the social workers sub-sector, then they'd get to throw 40 votes at a field of 80-odd candidates.

40. Goddamn. Votes.

On the other hand, half of the sub-sectors had less candidates than positions. They were declared to be uncontested, and candidates got in automatically. In some contested sub-sectors, candidates were elected with double-figure votes (Hong Kong has nearly 8 million people).

3% of Hong Kong are registered voters. The voter turnout was 17%.

So...

0.5% of the population vote for an arbitrarily allocated portion of an 800-member Election Committee which has no subsequent responsibilities or means of accountability to its constituents which then elects the head of government which has no subsequent accountability to the Election Committee.

Inspired! Diabolical! Stole the idea off Babylon 5!

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Before I left Wellington, I spent about two hours explaining the flat accounts to one of the remaining flatmates. I suspect we're one of the few flats that have a single-ledger double-entry accounting system. It's pretty bad-ass, as far as accounting systems go. It don't follow nobody's rules. I did sixth form accounting and promptly forgot the lot of it, but when I became the head tenant in a 9 person flat, bits and pieces started coming back, and the weird system evolved.

Anyway, back at the 9 person flat, one of the flatmates was more or less asked to leave. He was insistent that the flat owed him money. We disagreed, and he insisted on auditing the books. So I happily gave him the 12 column double-entry monster, and that was the last I heard from him.

Guess the Hong Kong elections are like that.

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Also, apologies for posting NGA late. My fault, not Jarrod's.

Click here for more NGA.

Click here for more NGA.

When I first started out in student media, I received a sound piece of general legal advice:

Defamation is easy. If you didn’t publish anything that was potentially defamatory, you wouldn’t publish anything about anyone at all. The consideration for publication isn’t “is this defamatory”, it’s “how likely am I to get sued”.

Being an ethnic group (i.e. Not an individual or legal entity), you can’t be defamed, so you get zero points.

On the other hand, being, say, married to a QC, that will get you lots of points.

The Listener was kind enough to give me a page to rebut Coddington this week. However, being the grown-ups that they are, they were a bit tetchy about the possibility of Coddington suing. Their Chief Subeditor spent considerable time going through checking all my stats, and in the end their lawyers went through the piece with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch, cutting out lines such as my claim that when Deborah Coddington just dropped in the “disturbing fact” that 4 out of 5 Asian pregnancies end in abortion, she was basically saying “Asians kill babies”, as well as the words “dishonest”, “malicious” and “irresponsible”.

I didn’t even try to get “making shit up” past them.

Incidentally, the 4 out of 5 stats was for teenage pregnancies. She just forgot to mention this. She has since admitted this mistake in the Herald on Sunday, but sans apologies. She doesn’t think that Asians will find “Asians kill babies” offensive?

I couldn’t help but think that, if North & South had spent half the time checking the facts on that cover article as the Listener spent checking my 700 words, they’d have done themselves a huge favour. But then again, maybe not. It’s not like I’m married to a QC. Heck, last time I had to pass a hat around to pay for lawyers.

But to date, I have not heard from Coddington, North & South, or their lawyers. I have no choice but to assume that their case is so solid, so self-evidently unassailable, that there is no need for defence or explanation. Therefore, the only honourable course of action is to concede that they are, in fact, right.

I have therefore closed all my P kitchens, thrown all my poached paua back into the sea (they can survive being frozen, right?), and sold my souped-up rice-rocket, my 1984 Honda City. I will be boarding a plane for Hong Kong shortly.

Good-bye.

(Hat tip to Gareth Richards for the title.)