|
November 2008 - Posts
-
Like any other Indian I was devastated at what happened in Mumbai
on 26th Nov 2008. Watching Television over the last 4 days it was a mixed feeling
of Anger, Scare, Sorry & Disappointment. I pray for the departed souls to rest
in peace and for almighty to give strength to the families that lost their loved ones
and for the injured for speedy recovery.
Since lot has been reported about the incident around the world, I was not sure whether
I too should be writing about this. Then I decided that every Indian has to raise
his/her voice against this atrocity, so here is what I feel on this:
-
Indian Political establishment, the government & the intelligence machinery have
failed spectacularly once more. There is no point in blaming the
present Central or State Government for this, this is a failure of government at all
levels over the last two decades - ever since the fall of "Cold War" and
the raise of "Global Terrorism"
-
Over the decades, time and again Indian Government and Indian Civil Service
have shown by their non-action that they don't value the loss of a life especially
of a ordinary Citizen. For them only the lives of Political Party Chiefs,
Ministers and their immediate family members lives have any value
-
I just can't come to terms on how easy it was for the Terrorists to come into India
without being stopped and how easy it was for them to smuggle huge arms and ammunitions.
Does India have any coastal guards and navy worth mentioning?
-
Though I felt the operation by security forces was very slow, we should commend them
for handling it skillfully with no civilian lives lost due to their firing, for not
using disproportionate gun power and for capturing one terrorist alive
-
I am at loss on why our security forces don't seem to be taking advantage
of technology. For two days they kept saying they don't know the number of
terrorists and where they are inside the buildings. Why didn't they use any Infra-Red
Scanners, Motion Detectors, Satellite Sensors and the other modern fighting gadgets
we see the American Armed Forces using skillfully in Iraq?. Does Indian Armed Forces
have any of these or just like everything else in Indian Government was the budgets
allocated for these swindled by Corruption?
-
Without these modern gadgets how does Indian Armed Forces dream about fighting even
a conventional battle - with the changing world order wars are fought nowadays in
Cities and not in deserts. Are these gadgets too expensive for India to buy, I don't
think so especially when treasury can spent US$14 Billion (INR 70,000 Crores) on the
famous farm waivers and for issuing government bonds for subsidizing "Fuel"
- both of which yielded Political capital
-
Though it is purely symbolic I still welcome the resignation of Central
Home Minister Mr.Shivraj Patel
-
Though I don't agree with American & George Bush policies on their International
Policies and Iraq War. Still due credit should be given to them for protecting their
country (USA) in the last 8 years. After the devastating
9/11 there have been no major Terror Attacks with in the United States. In
a sense they skillfully moved the battlefield of the Global war on Terror from being
within USA borders to outside USA
-
As an Indian, I feel ashamed that we still don't have any Crisis Management Infrastructure
in India as Mr.Ratan Tata rightfully pointed out. We don't even have the basics like
a US "911" helpline in India. I am not sure how many people who got stuck
inside the hotels knew who to call for help - I certainly don't know
-
India needs all the help it can get especially from US, Israel and other countries
with huge expertise on fighting terror. Now is not the time to trumpet how great Indian
Scientist are, or on how great our technology is, or being self-reliant, etc. But
I am afraid our civil service will ensure this opportunity is missed to work with
the world to our advantage by their outdated bureaucracy. A fine example of this happened
today when the FBI
was detained for hours in Mumbai Airport
One of my friends sent me a nice email summarizing on what he feels will happen from
here which is worth reproducing here on his own words: "I really don't want
any more cries of "Indian resilience", peace and harmony. Indian resilience
is nothing but casual indifference if not directly affected. We'll go back to watching
our stupid soaps and reality shows once the real-life "reality show" of
the terror attacks are over. A few discussions over dinner and drinks and we're done.
We're mostly peaceful and harmonious people - but the ones massacring us aren't. So
these kind of displays don't really do anything. What we need now is a strong
government with a strong anti-terror law. One that can have the guts to take out terrorists
wherever and whoever they are...Till then, I will remain cynical and angry"
Having said all this I am still an optimist at heart and that is the reason I have
a photograph of the NSG team on the start of this post. Finally, I salute
the brave men and women from Mumbai Police, National Security Guards & Army who
lost their lives in the battle.
Bookmarks:
-
Video - NDTV's
Randeep Nandl explaining what an alleged terror suspect may be telling Indian
authorities about the planning of the Mumbai attacks
-
Attack in India - Summary
by NewsWeek, Summary by New York Times
-
We're
all Bombayites today by Vir Sanghvi
-
BigB on the anger
of the ordinary citizen and on complete
loss in faith in the system and in the governance
|
-
Today Prof.A.G. Ramakrishnan from IISc, Bangalore posted an announcement in INFITT
discussion group announcing openings for BE Graduates for Research Positions at Mile
Lab, IISc, Bangalore. This caught my eye as the project described was exciting one
involving software applications for visually challenged. I am giving a link
in this post to the announcement for the benefit of graduates inclined towards research
who will find this position interesting.
MILE Laboratory at Indian Institute of Science is actively involved in developing
an automated book reader for the visually challenged. This research
involves image mosaicing, page layout analysis, script recognition, speech synthesis
and natural language processing. You can read the announcement from the IISc
page here or in
PDF format here
|
-
Like everyone else I get unsolicited unsolicited calls on my mobile phone. What is
more irritating is when you are already a customer with the bank that is calling -
they don't even check whether someone is their customer or not, instead they randomly
call numbers. To communicate our displeasure with this, if we decide to switch banks,
it is not so easy to do. And almost all private banks and insurance companies in India
seems to be doing this, so you will not be able to find a company that doesn't. I
bank mostly with Public Sector banks but for some convenience like Web Banking,
Credit Cards and ATM I bank with a private bank. As consumers we need a remedy to
this problem.
About a year or so back, TRAI introduced the National
Do Not Call Registry (NDNC Registry). Telemarketers are needed by law to check
with the NDNC database before making a call or face a penalty. You can register in
NDNC by sending a SMS with text "START DND" to 1909 or
register in your Mobile Service Provider's website (for me it will be Vodafone).
Apart from TRAI's NDNC Registry, RBI recommended about 3 years for all Banks
under it to have an individual DNC registry with them, you can register in each
of them by going to their respective websites. I have registered
myself in all of these sites, after registering the number of calls I get have
certainly come down. If you still get calls you can complain to the callers that they
are violating law by calling a DNC number.
Last week on a single day I got two marketing calls from ICICI Bank and one call from
ABN Amro. Irritated I was looking for a remedy, I found
a page in ICICI website to complain if you keep getting calls even after registering.
I emailed to the id donotcall at icicibank.com that was in the page
quoting the time, my mobile number and the phone numbers from which I got the call.
I added in the email that if I continued to get calls I will seek remedy by lodging
a complaint to RBI Ombudsman and TRAI consumer cell. I was not hopeful of any reply,
but I was pleasantly surprised to get a reply within 2 days from ICICI stating that
they have taken note of my complaint, apologized and assured that I will not get any
further calls. I was certainly impressed by this service from ICICI and I hope other
banks will follow this good practice.
|
-
Necessity is the mother of invention they say. How true is this statement!. When you
thought the Music Industry is doomed because of piracy from free MP3 downloads, someone
out there comes with a new model.
In the above chart from Economist you
can see that the falling sales of physical (Audio CD) media is not being compensated
by the rise in Digital sales. The Digital sales comes predominantly from iTunes (and
other similar pay per download services) and from subscription services (like Rhapsody)
which offer a flat fee per month for unlimited songs. Both the models have produced
mixed results and are expected to continue with no clear winner as the choice depends
on individual preferences. One clear trend that emerged in the last one year was the
death of "DRM" with Apple leading the way and Amazon following it. As Nicholas
Negroponte wrote in his classic book "Being Digital", you can never categorize
an individual "bit" (Binary 1 or 0) to be of a particular character (Porn, Politics,
News, Sports and so on), so policing the Internet for Piracy can never be fool-proof.
I believe policing is certainly not the fix for increasing music revenues, instead
a new business model that ensures ubiquitous DRM free music to listeners world over
and fair-price/compensation to content producers will assure more success. World over
many models are being experimented including Ad funding - which I feel will be of
limited success, will not be a failure but also not a block-buster. In this connection,
a new business model tried out by Nokia in its "Comes
with Music" (CWM) looks very promising.
CWM simply reverses the economics of Music Industry. Instead of paying for each song
or track, your music cost is loaded on to the listening device. You buy the Nokia
handset for around $230 and you get unlimited songs for one year, after which you
can buy a subscription or buy a new device. Of course, Nokia wants you to buy a new
device every year and that's the attraction for them to try this model. This bundling
of content cost on to the device is in a way similar to TV License fee in UK, where
a tax that is collected
to watch TV in UK helps government to subsidize BBC content production costs.
This is the reason why many of the content in BBC websites are restricted by IP to
permit UK viewers only.
For me, I hope someone in India (may be Reliance Big or Hungama or Airtel or Times)
brings out this model for India. Unfortunately, till date there is no comprehensive
subscription based sites in India offering Indian Film and Classical music. You are
left with buying physical media then ripping it yourself (which is what I do) or paying
blatantly expensive price for each track to legal sites or simply pirate.
|
-
Few weeks back while at my US trip I read this book "Notes
from a Big Country" by Bill
Bryson. Like his other books, Bryson's humour is unmistakable in this book as
well. Like others have said in the Amazon's book comments you will find yourself laughing
loud in many places.
The book is a collection of a weekly column in Mail
on Sundays Night and Day magazine in UK. So this book has been written more
for an international audience who will find things different in USA from their country.
Having visited USA many times I can say I was baffled too at many of similar scenes
observed by Bryson. So in many places of the book I could relate to his experience
and enjoy the scene. Commenting on common American living habits, you might be mistaken
like some Americans (who have commented in Amazon)
that Byrson is making "fun" of Americans at large. This being my fourth
book written by Bryson, I can say that he has nothing against America, this is his
style - It is the same when he writes about UK, Europe or
even Shakespeare,
so nothing different here. More than the scenes described, what I really liked is
Bryson's extraction of Humour from all the weird situations like the once I have mentioned
below:
-
Picture ID to be shown in US Airports (Bryson calls this as Permissible Visual Cognitive
Imaging)
-
Junk Food Heaven - "We don't usually clean our fridge - we just box it up
every four or five years and send it off to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta
with a note to help themselves to anything that looks scientifically promising"
-
The countless forms used by American Immigration - "You can spend days repeatedly
dialling a phone number that is forever engaged, only to be told when you finally
do get through that you must call another number, which the person tells you once
in a mumble and you don't quite catch before you are cut off"
-
Commercials - "The new Dodge Backfire. Rated number one against the Chrysler
Inert for Handling. Rated number one against the Plymouth Repellant for mileage"
-
Cupholder Revolution - "But our computers don't come with cupholders"
-
Why no one walks - "Not long after we moved here we had the people next door
round for dinner and - I swear this is true - they drove"
-
The great indoors and the obsession for living always in a climate controlled environment
- "Skywalks - enclosed pedestrian flyovers"
-
Abundance of choice in American super markets - "Thirty five varieties of
Crest Toothpaste"
-
Spinning the truth - how the "special offer" advertisements exasperates
the truth
If you have visited USA and felt things are different from your country then this
book is a must read for you.
|
-
While doing my morning walking today (after a long time) in my neighbourhood, I saw
these Public Safety Message boards kept by Chennai City Police at various places.
These are aimed to educate people with simple lines along with an image on importance
of common safety messages. A good initiative by the police and we should congratulate
the sponsors who helped for this campaign.
(Click the above image for the entire album in full resolution)
|
|
|
|