A JOKE IN A MAGAZINE DECADES AGO quoted a laundry advertisement of in the early days of washing machines. The ad said: “We don’t tear your clothes with machines. We do it carefully by hand.” Torn by hand or by a machine, torn clothes are equally useless.

Uttar Pradesh Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati’s declaration that she was defeated by Electronic Voting Machines and not by Bharatiya Janata Party was, however, not meant to be a joke (though it sounds like a cheap one). Continue reading Paper Democracy, Not Machine-Made