The ‘must’ list appears very important because we, the Indians, mostly donot understand the difference between freedom and liberty, and also rights vs duties and what others should do vs what we should do. We are very intelligent and rational as individuals but pathetic while collaborating and cooperating. If each of Indians only take care of this ‘must’ list, the country will change and see its pinnacles. The interesting part is that the ‘must’ list doesnt require us to sacrifice much of our resources, money, or time. This is a part of the daily life chores and only ’self regulation’ can make this possible.

The ’should’ list is optional, depending on one’s own choice or discretion - by not doing which one’s not legally or morally wrong/irresponsible. This list is not even required to discussed if everybody is self-regulated and takes care of ‘must’ list for oneself. This list is being discussed only because ‘must’ list is ignored by one part of the inhibitants and the apathy of those who sould have taken care of the ‘must’ list. And thats where the celebrities, corporate, or somehow privilaged section of citizens come into the picture.

A celebrity can be anybody because, according to me, a celebrity is a person who has ‘an area of influence”. A common man can influence herself, however a celebrity can influence a group of people. The larger the area (of influence), the bigger the stature of the celebrity. When a common man starts this mission (in the form of social or political activism), she has to first work towards increasing her reach and the area of influence. A celebrity gets this by default, so, when a celebrity enters in the arena of activism, she starts with the immediate action. And when a bigger celebrity comes in picture, she can immediately make many people acting on that task. So, the celebrity stature gives a person an edge, which is mostly the power to influence and width of her reach.

I think this is the reason people raise their heads towards celebrities. But that doesn’t mean a celebrity must do it, definitely not. In this sense, everybody fall in the same pool, hence it is pretty senseless to criticize a celebrity (or for that matter, anybody) if she doesn’t do it. If she takes care of the ‘must’ list, doesn’t influence others to go against it using her reach, she is already a responsible citizen. What more, she is an excellent professional which is already somehow contributing to the development of the country. If somebody leaves her profession (no matters how lucrative or profitable it is), then it is way too great; if she doesn’t, it is still great. We founded one such organization called ‘Dream India Project’ two years before and during last 2 years, much more people joined DIP and involved in debates and activities. Most of us are excellent professionals and are contributing to our professions very well. I am running my own company and when I spend my time, effort, and money with DIP, it is totally my choice and interest. Same goes with fellow DIPians. Even if we don’t do this, we are responsible citizens and contributing to the development of the country with our works in our professions (and this is already beyond the ‘must’ list). Cribs never help, acts do. And I have found that most of the cribs and complains come from those who don’t act. I feel very great that these kinds of topic are being discussed very widely nowadays.

I strongly condemn this on the behalf of Indian culture & traditions. Please join me!! Anybody there? Muthallik?

Sanjay had actually visited the office to get a copy of his original ration card which was in a poor condition. But when he was asked to pay up for it, he decided to expose the officials. "I wanted to test how sincere the officers were, so I gave Chief Ministers name,” says Sanjay.

And this is what the Divisional Commissioner of Pune Division had to say on this:

"Here something has gone wrong, because we have checked up with the card that has been issued, there has been exploitation of system, money has been paid therefore we have put two people under suspension,"

Such fun and WTFness! But, all the way, this is not something which should surprise us. Corruption is everywhere, at each place and almost everyone in the government offices is corrupt. What matters is the level of work and person who has to be sucked out by the babus. This is known to one and all. However, such cases come to the media only with the occurences of serious or humourous cases. For example, the bribery related with political ghotalas or something like passport of Abu Salem. But, in those cases, the client and moolah both are high and mighty.

Even Rs 2000 isn't something cheaper bribe of sorts. I have seen policemen and panchayat sewaks asking for Rs 2-10. RPF jawans in Passenger trains or state police on the street markets or traffic police don't ask for more than 10 Rs or so. This happens everyday, everywhere. And this is something which is very much impossible to curb. The ground-level corruption will always be inevitable.

Another WTF News: NRAI President Digvijay Singh slams shooters Abhinav Bindra and Jaspal Rana for not acknowledging the system's contribution to their success. He said that the success of Bindra and Rana had been possible due to the system set up by the Indian shooting federation but it seems to have gone to their heads and their statements betray arrogance. (source) (more on Abhinav bindra)

And at 10.45 of night, with a very sad heart, I had to bid farewell to my 3 partners and my 20 fellow citymen who passed away today evening.

I think Google now arrogantly realizes that the 'web' and especially the 'search' territory are mostly monopolized by Google Inc's products. In addition to the search business, Google has worked quite aggressively, during last 3-4 years, to capture other territories which have larger hit counts. For example, blog, docs, payment gateway, social networks, mail, chat, open source codes, albums, news, software packs, and most recently, Knol (Google's version of Wikipedia). Google has been exclusively promoting Firefox browser (as referrals or Google packs) since few years. So, Google has realized, assuming that netizens worldwide use Google products extensively, why should they use other browsers and why should Google still promote Firefox. Additionally, when Microsoft launched IE 7, it explicitly promoted Windows Live Search through its web browser (quite natural to Microsoft). Though, later Microsoft had to accommodate other providers after Google cried out loud. Now Microsoft has launched newer version of Internet Explorer, IE 8, which is Beta 2 release. In Internet Explorer 8, the search box has two listed search providers - MS Live and Google. But, the default search provider is the Microsoft Live. If a user is such naive that she doesn't care about which provider is she is using and she only cares about searching the web, she will obviously use Windows Live Search instead of Google Search. Though Microsoft doesn't violate the legal matters here, it definitely tries to outcast other competitive products in its own products. In recent times, Google-Microsoft war increased more after Google's CEO Eric Schmidt offered his open support to Jerry Yung, during the much louder episode of Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo. With the launch of Google's own web browser, one can expect this tussle to continue further. For now, I will wait for the responses of Microsoft and also, Mozilla. Also, how much hiccup is coming on the way of developers who will have another browser in which to test their web applications to make sure of browser compatibilities.

There is one pretty interesting part of this launch. For the first time, I have seen an entire comic book launched to promote a product and make users understand all know-hows of it. Google's Chrome comic book describes most marketable features of the browser graphically. And I think it is really interesting. Read the Chrome comic book here. This is one such cool strategy which is going to be really popular in the marketing world.

As far as the coolness of Google is concerned, not everybody is impressed with it. One of them is Sergey Solyanik who just left Google to join Microsoft after his one-year stint at Google. After he left Google, he wrote a post about it on his blog. Here is what he has to say about the coolness at Google:-

The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.

Since I've been an infrastructure person for most of my life, I value reliability far, far more than "coolness", so I could never really learn to love the technical work I was doing at Google. I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there's just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it's a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.

So, let's see how this coolness-vs-reliability works with the product where it matters the most. Here is the download link for the Chrome browser.

As of now, when I am using Google Chrome, it seems a nice experience. Let me summarise the features of Chrome that I experienced so far. Very sleek and cool design, faster, doesn't cover too much window space (vertically you only have two rows of controls - one for tabs and another for address bar et al, in spite of other browsers where the toolbar stuffs eat almost 25% of your window's vertical space), and so on. In terms of coolness, Google really rocks and Chrome holds the similar promises. Nevertheless, the first thing which catches you eyes is its design and transitions. Other nice features are - download files feature, incognito window (no cookie or history will be recorded for a site opened in this window), developers panel, address bar which also works as search bar and taking suggestions from history/bookmarks/Google suggestions, etc. Furthermore, the greatest of them all is that all tabs run as different processes (or programs). This significantly improves speed and security. Speed because you can monitor and manage which tab is consuming much CPU and memory. The task manager of browser shows the CPU and Memory usages of each tab (hence, website opened in those tabs). In your 'windows task manager' also, each tab appears as different processes. So, you can kill those killer processes anytime you feel some trouble. Security because, the tabs are not allowed to communicate with other tabs or the computer. This means, all malwares will have no ability to enter into other territories. For the rest of the user experiences, I found many of the features of Safari and Firefox in Chrome. But then, Google has already announced that it has used Webkit (mother of Apple's Safari) and Firefox quite extensively. So, for that, we can forgive Google.

Indeed, there are also some lack of features for users and hiccups for developers. From user's point of view, bookmark manager, full screen control, and page magnifier are absent. As far as the technical hiccups are concerned, its too early to find them out. But, within two hours of usage, I found two errors and both of them are related this blog of mine. First, the double click dictionary feature (after you select a word and double click it, a window opens which go to freedictionary explaining everything about the word, ie, dictionary, synonyms, history, abbreviations, etc). Second, FCKeditor, a very popular and free web-based text editor, which I used in my blog's admin module, doesn't work at all. When I opened the admin part, I could see the text area where it suppossed to have the editor in place. These are only two as of now, but again, these were quite trivial to me. And that results to that I can't scrap other browsers and use Chrome only. I am sure I am going to find other bugs or limitations in the browse as I use it more in coming days.

On the other note, here is an interesting comic book series, Silicon Apartment, featuring Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and occasionally Steve Ballmer. Pretty hilarious, must read!!

And what about this!!! hehehe!

An article on NY Times clears this dilemma. No other language or dialect capitalizes personal pronouns and, even, English language used dotted 'i' (though, the word was 'ic' insted of 'i') till the 13th century. According to "The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology ":

Modern and Middle English I developed from earlier i in the stressed position.  I came to be written with a capital letter thereby making it a distinct word and avoiding misreading handwritten manuscripts.  In the northern and midland dialects of England the capitalized form I appeared about 1250. In the south of England, where Old English ic  early shifted in pronunciation to ich (by palatalization), the form I did not become established until the 1700's although it appears sporadically before that time)."

How does that make any effect? Caroline Winter says:

It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot. There have, of course, been plenty of rich and dominant cultures throughout history that have gotten by just fine without capitalizing the first-person pronoun or ever writing it down at all. There have also been cultures that committed atrocities even while capitalizing “you.”

Read entire piece here. 

Traditional geothermal technology harnesses naturally-occurring pockets of steam or hot water that rise from deep underground, bringing with them the energy stored by the rocks there. EGS allows those traditional techniques to be applied almost anywhere. By drilling deep into the Earth and pumping water into the hole, the underground hot rocks fracture, allowing the water to circulate and be heated. The hot water comes back the surface and is then used to drive turbines and produce electricity.

Here is a video which explains EGS technology:

It was 1994, when India grabbed 3 golds in the commonwealth (5 in total) in shooting, featuring Jaspal Rana with 3 medals. Since then, Rana overshadows Indian shooting till 2006 Asian Games. Mansher Singh and Samresh Jung complimented Rana in Pistol events for a long time. Samresh Jung's failures at Olympcis, now and then, can't defy his talents that he posses and has shown at times. It is unfortunate that he is yet to reckon in the frontline. Among the females, there were two noteworthy players - Usha Unnikrishnan and Anjali Vedpathak (Bhagwat). Commonwealth 2002 was the culmination of Indian shooters (and weightlifters). Indians almost swept both categories with 24 medals (14 golds) in Shooting and 27 medals (11 golds) in Weightlifting. Mansher Singh and Usha Unnikrishnan had retired till then to give places for other future players. Many of them emerged as the stars of Indian shooting. Some of them were Anjali Bhagwat, Rajyawardhan Singh Rathore, and a young chap called Abhinav Bindra.

> Don't call (me) brother, when (you are) sitting with (your) boyfriend.

Hehe!

"The amount of money which goes to these institutions is enough to open 30 to 40 IITs with lots of seats that can ensure admission to average candidates,"

I  received June edition of 'Book Today', a monthly newsletter of India Today Book Club, today. The cover picture of the newsletter was of "Amitav Ghosh" who has recently released his new novel, Sea of Poppies, the first in the trilogy of novels. ITBC is offering 10% discount on this book.

The interesting part was that Chetan Bhagat's latest book "the 3 mistakes of my life" is coming absolutely free with the purchase of Sea of Poppies. This book was released only two months before and the writer, who was the all time bestseller author after release of his first book, is being distributed free with another book. Seems the magic is lost now or was it really a magic ever before?

The reason is not the market, rather it is very much the marketers and the producers themselves. After one book of an author becomes bestseller, the publishers seduce the author with a very hefty sum of money which makes the writer to write anything and everything but the literature. Then, begins the exploitation of author, literature, readers, goodwill, subject matter, and so on. I remember authors of yesteryears used to take gap of 5-13 years in writing and releasing a book. Ayn Rand took 4 years to release Anthem, 5 years to release The Fountainhead, and 14 years to release her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged. For Richard Bach, it was 7 years for "the bridge across forever" and 4 years for "the one". The gap between the release of "the golden gate" and "the suitable boy" was 7 years. Chetan Bhagat took 2 years to write each of his books. Paulo Coelho is the rockstar, he writes two books every year. It is an urge to exploit the market hence the books are no more a piece of literature these days, but a product to sell. Something like - think about the plot which can be sold and write something on it. If you couldn't think of writing more pages than the petty plot demanded, write anything bullshit that you have read during your college years and afterwards.

Not only that, the subjects and plots are also being badly exploited. Take two examples - one, IITs or IIMs or any premium college with a bunch of youths; two, stories (mainly, cultural clashes) of Indian diaspora (NRIs). Now, search the market for the books based on one of these subjects and count the number of books available out there. Here, we are bypassing the non-fictions (better say, self-help or so-called management books) which are more bullshits than the fictions. Many of them give you a feel that even you can write such books after reading 8-10 similar kinds of books. But, this is the way it goes. And this is the reason why books of Ayn Rand and Joseph Heller are still bestsellers. Authors like JRR Tolkien and Mario Puzo had created truly fascinating, unique and separate world in their books and characters of authors like Ayn Rand and Albert Camus were so visually elaborated that we created a flawless images of them in our minds. So much that we are not able to accept and enjoy a movie based on those books and characters. Whereas, mostly books of these days are very stereotypical and identical to their peers. Characters are boring and plots are repeated.

Books are written because they have to be written and to be read by the world. Its a pity that most of recently released books lack this reason. They have a plot which has been repeated umpteen times and an idea which could easily be expressed in an article or a blog entry. Writing is no more a passion, but a fashion. This has created a peculiar kind of gap in demand and supply where both are increasing with the same speed.

Mumbai Journal of New York Times reports:

The world is filled with eating houses of every kind, from hamburger joints to three-star restaurants. There are places you drive through and places where you sit down. But the world may be unfamiliar with a Mumbai variation on the theme: the hunger cafe.

The hunger cafes have stood for decades on a stretch of road in the Mahim neighborhood. Mumbai’s broken, drifting men squat in neat rows in front of each establishment, waiting patiently. Vats full of food simmer behind the doors. What separates them from the food is the 25-cent-per-plate cost — a gulf harder to bridge than one might assume. But every so often, a car pulls up and makes a donation, and the men dine.

Also,

Among the swelling middle class, anonymous, checkbook-style charity has yet to catch on. Indians have shown scant enthusiasm for giving to abstract causes. Indian charity is feudal charity: making donations to those below you in your household chain of command. And so, to bring these men indoors with the notion of safeguarding their dignity would risk their starvation, in the calculation of the restaurateurs. They believe the men must be exhibited like this, sunken and sad-eyed. They must gaze at passers-by with that obedient, mournful, reverential stare that well-born Indians have learned to expect. They must be advertisements for their own cause.

I have nothing else to add.

Ever since the existence of the mankind has been historically registered, the music has been the life for the man. This is the prime medium of communication between the entities where the communication was supposed to be non-existent. Man used music to communicate with existent and non-existent entities both, man communicated the belief in the form of music. It, thus, can be said that if the man has ever be able to communicate with the God (if he ever existed), it was the music which functioned as the messenger, as the Baba Bulleh Shah dances to express his love with the god by singing ‘tere ishq ne nachaya’ or the Yaksha in Kaildasa’s Meghdootam sends the message to his beloved waiting for him at the other side of the country. And the supreme power seems to be appreciating this because the music has came out to us with better rhythms by the help of the several voices of the universe, like the thunderstorm, rivers, trees, wind blows, raindrops, mountains, waterfalls, seashores, and so on. Even the other living children of the world, like birds and animals, have entertained our senses with more beauty and diverse multifaceted sounds. The music has even been able to catch the voices and silence of the days, nights, and space. Thomas Carlylesays – “All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!” And this beauty lies everywhere, one only needs to listen and synchronize with all the beings. What other blessings a man could have received from the supreme? Indeed, music is what feelings sound like.

It is another happy new year. Sounds cliché, eh! But no, it’s 2008 which has become alive for the first time, with new resolutions, new plans, new schemes, new this, new that…everything will be new, as we expect, right! Well, it has to be, it’s a new year after all. But, the foundations of most of the New Year happenings are already set in 2007 itself and significantly all the news headlines will be the extensions of the last year’s editorials. Some of them will turn out to be marathons whereas most for them will be sprints only. Yet everybody hopes for a change and a totally afresh string of events, whether it is Hillary Clinton or Saurav Ganguly or you or me. This hope is the almost similar everywhere, irrespective of the political and geographical and social boundaries. A Pakistani will hope to get rid of General and Fatwas, whereas an Indian will expect to get the Comrades and rallies sacked by their destinies. The expectations are the same whether it is a mortgage loans defaulter in US or the oil barons in Middle East. Whether they are the monks of Myanmar suspicious of how the juntas act this year or the rural Indians speculating that how much money finally comes out from the government funds and policies after the largest logistics channel of the world formed by Indian bureaucracy and politics which can get a place in Guinness Book if some news channel gets an idea of it and start some Lead Guinness or send SMS for national pride campaign. In short, though the details could differ, the essence wouldn’t.

I also have some questions which will be taking my curious attentions this year. Let’s see if the answers could be obvious or the New Year will really welcome some real changes.

Nude paintings of Hindu goddesses by Madhuri Fida Hussein, Calling “Allah” names by Ms. Nasreen, exclusive comments of Karunanidhi over Lord Ram, and so on. These free expressions get followed by the so-called saviour authorities (read, morons) in no time and then, the game starts with several reactions, like violence, riots, fatwas, multidimensional shouting, banning, eliminations, exiles, moral policing, and so many other things. The great India debate, then, gets initiated by media, gurus, religious bigots, politically baptized intellectuals, elite class, and other socially charged people. Some support free speech, some religious interests. Some refutes some; others attack this, rest cry out for the sake of god-knows-what. “Aam junta” get irritated by this cliché and find nothing quite interesting in all this melodrama which further leads to the wastage of all the efforts put by all three parties. This is not the ignorance of general public, rather this is such obvious that even Manmohan Desaai would have discontinued iterating his formulas by this utter obviousness. The continuous cyclic process of sudden rise and sudden fall, however, don’t affect these bigots because the centuries of dependency has made India full of idle juntas, bigots, morons, and Karats. This is still okay, but boss why are you disturbing the life of common men and daily chores of the nation? Will they ever stop with this? Gibberish is gibberish just like “A is A”, doesn’t matter whatsoever way you use, duh!

I strongly support free speech, freedom of expression, right to speak as a fundamental right, and all such related stuffs. I would appreciate every step that is taken for the advancement of the liberty of the man and the mankind. What else a man can give to the mankind but the growth and to make the earth a better place to live? What is the essence of the existence of a living entity if it is not free? This has to make an axiom, a rule, and a fundamental right – a right of man to be free, beyond any boundaries and not captured by any limitations. A man is free to believe in anything and a man is free to refute to be controlled by any belief. A man is free without violating another man’s right to be free.

According to 49′O, in a particular constituency, if a voter has dislike to all of the candidates competing there, then he can show his dislike to all of them by registering for 49′O. Now, if the number of 49′O count is larger than that of the winning candidates total vote count, then a re-election is called there.

We will discuss about 49'O at the end of this article (must read the end of this article). This time again, the mail looked too much promising to me. I was busy with work so I ignored this rumour and got back to work. Last night, in an Orkut community Rational Behavioural, I saw that another friend of mine has posted the same thing. Surprisingly, dozens of people already had replied to that post and even few had forwarded the mail to others as well. Lets look at the mail first.

Right to Emergency Care:
Date Of Judgment: 23/02/2007.
Case No.: Appeal (civil) 919 of 2007.

The Supreme Court has ruled that all injured persons especially in the case of road traffic accidents, assaults, etc., when brought to a hospital / medical centre, have to be offered first aid, stabilized and shifted to a higher centre / government centre if required. It is only after this that the hospital can demand payment or complete police formalities. In case you are a bystander and wish to help someone in an accident, please go ahead and do so. Your responsibility ends as soon as you leave the person at the hospital. The hospital bears the responsibility of informing the police, first aid, etc.

Please do inform your family and friends about these basic rights so that we all know what to expect and what to do in the hour of need.Please not only go ahead and forward, use it too!!!!

I was astounded. The first thing that kicked my mind to get some details was the date of the judgment. According to the mail, the Supreme Court verdict came in the month of February. And the verdict was very much revolutionary. So, when our media fills a complete page on absolutely redundant issues, then how come it missed such great news. The suspicion raised.