The Central government today announced a significant move concerning the "rising intolerance" in India. It had earlier this month, instructed the Humanities department in the Indian Institute of Science to identify a metric of intolerance which could then be taken to Système International d'Unités (SI) I for ratification. After discussions with science departments in the Institute, the department has proposed the "intoleron" as the new name for this unit - 1 intoleron being once instance of intolerance not exceeding 10 words of verbal/written expression of intolerance.
The unit has already been submitted to SI which will take into consideration recent events in Europe (such as the refugee crisis) and Americas to decide if the base definition should be modified. The 'intoleron' will be a quantized unit, and the SI will issue a reference scale mapping other acts of intolerance (such as tripping up refugees) to intolerons. In order to prevent incorrect measurement due to differences in languages, each intoleron must have a language qualifier without which, it is a meaningless quantity.
For example, schadenfreude would be 1 German intoleron and also equivalent to 1 English intoleron because the meaning can be expressed in only 8 words. Schadenfreude is the "pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune."
A spokesperson for the Government said that the unit was necessary because news channels had started to provide highly conflicting scales of intolerance in the country causing significant confusion due to which the Government was unable to decide the scale of action to initiate. Having a standard unit will allow the Government to gauge the exact magnitude of the issue and act accordingly.
-Bureau reports
