Website discriminates against ugly people

A dating website has kicked out 5,000 of its members simply because they gained weight over the festive season, but the good news for Indians, who form a substantial chunk of www.beautifulpeople.com, is that they were spared the chop.

The site has created quite a stir in the virtual world, after disowning members because they put on weight after Christmas and New Year festivities and no longer qualified for membership. The company said it expelled 1,520 users from the US, 88 people from Russia, 832 from the UK, 176 from Turkey, 533 from Canada, 220 from Denmark, 510 from Poland, 323 from France, 425 from Germany and 402 from Italy. No one from India was ousted.

Beauty Meter
So how beautiful do you have to be to qualify? Beautifulpeople.com has a running meter which decides your attractiveness after you upload your picture. And for those “too ugly” to make it, there’s an option to tour the website as a guest. The existing members vote in new ones, who qualify if they get a certain number of votes. The site declares that its members never have to “filter through unattractive people on mainstream sites” and ‘guarantees’ that “your date will always be beautiful”.

Offended visitors
“Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded,” the site’s founder Robert Hintze reportedly said in a BBC interview. With 5,40,000 members from 16 countries and a traffic of 4 million visitors per day, the site also has a fair share of critics and anti-groups on social networking sites . Writes Laila Masiqbal, on Facebook group Say no to http://BeautifulPeople.com, “It is definitely not the sexiest website nor the most elite.” Max Randall, on Antibeautifulpeople.com writes, “What ignorance!” while Igor Zanetti from Croatia says, “It is pretty
stupid. Frustrated freaks.”

A blogger on iamugleeee says, “I hate this website. It’s like going back to the dark ages. Somebody please spam them!!!!” Shom Ray, director, eMakerz: E Branding Solutions, a Delhiite says, “They are discriminating on the basis on looks. Such sites should be banned.”

Website to trace missing people

It is a small start to trace people who have gone missing.

The state government plans to design a website with details of missing people. It will have their photographs and will be accessible to all police stations, state Home Minister R.R. Patil said in the state legislative council on Tuesday.

Responding to a calling attention motion raised by the Shiv Sena’s Kiran Pawaskar, Patil said it would be helpful to police stations, particularly the railway and bus stand police outposts to get information to trace missing people.

Patil admitted that the number of missing children in the state, particularly in Mumbai, had risen sharply. There are around 3,800 to 4,000 children reported missing from Mumbai every year. Of them, on an average at least 300 children are never found.

The state government will launch a special drive across the state, particularly in Mumbai, to detect cases in which children are employed, forced into begging or used for other purposes.

Earlier, the Mumbai police had launched such a drive that helped the state to discourage exploitation of children.
More than 13,000 children were freed from the clutches of employers during the drive.

The proposed drive will be undertaken with the help of non-government organisations.

Patil said the government has already set up a special cell in the state police department to trace missing people and to detect cases of child labour.