Censhorship

So, I understand very little about computers and the internet or how one would even go about this, but apparently, the government of India has blocked access to a number of blogging websites, including, yes, blogspot. Read the article here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/19/asia/web.0719india.php

The specter of terrorism, of course, was speculated having invited the censhorship, but what I found more sinister: this speculation comes as afterthought. It is the ever-present villian, lurking, if it IS to be found in the text itself, in the last paragraph, a fleeting familiar word, a brief mention, a long-since understood fact of life. And yet it is there, grinding away to push the chugging machinery of the article "forward" (where?) -

And does this not show that it pushes US?

A small incident from my own life:

I once got off the tube because a man in my carriage made me extremely nervous. He had a bag on the ground between his knees which he constantly fidgeted with, nervous fingers running over it like flies, flickering over all of the zippers and tabs. His foot was in constant motion, his heel drumming against the ground faster than you could keep rhythm to any techno beat. And his eyes darted up and down the cab, though stopping and dropping so that all I saw were his shiny lids when he caught me staring, daring him to reveal himself. He won the game, though, and I got off at the next stop, rationalizing "better safe than sorry."

Nothing, of course, happened (but what if it had, a voice persists in me? the fleeting familiar word), and this is nothing compared to the magnitude of the censorship in India. We let it win; we let it push us (and certainly not forward). Too many of us, entire governments, let it push us into silence & basements and off trains & planes and out of cities and into Canada (oh wait, that's Bush, but it's all the same, isn't it?).

And now, worse, we take it for granted.