The disastrous ‘India Shining’ campaign of the NDA government now has a sequel in ‘India Building’ campaign planned by the UPA government It looks like the UPA government is planning an ad blitz in a campaign named “India Building” with a budget of 100 crores. The lack of imagination in the campaign is stunning – specially after the disaster that its predecessor turned out to be. A grotesque amount was spent by the previous NDA government on an ad campaign named “India Shining” in early 2004. Like any advertisement campaign is supposed to, India Shining campaign caught people’s attention. Everywhere […]
General Interest
Stark naked, next to a pool of urine, in the background of Chennai’s smelliest river, on the pedestrian walk in a noisy smoke-filled road was this child of three. He was completely engaged, almost oblivious to the world around. He held in his hand a slate and was practicing the letter “aa” in Tamil. Someone, possibly his mother, must have made neat squares in the slate for the child to practice writing. The family was homeless or were living by the shores of the unbearably smelly covam river. Amidst this harsh life she was teaching the child to learn. Since […]
The will to learn
Brutal and grotesque punishments deter crime better than an inefficient and corrupt legal system argue many Brutal punishments are back into public debate in India with the airing of the video below. A boy who had snatched a chain from a woman was caught and brutally punished by a mob – relentlessly. A Policeman joined in meting out this “justice” by finishing the act by tying the boy to his bike and dragging him in the road. Even before this furore has died from public debate there has been another mob action today emulating the infamous Bhagalpur blindings epitomised by […]
Bhagalpur blindings, Gangajal & brutality in Bihar today
A little note on how Hariprasad Chaurasia’s concert left me between agony and ecstasy Hariprasad Chaurasia is a man who never disappoints. I have been mesmerised for a while in every performance of his and always. Typically I walk out in a semi-trance with a feeling of ecstasy that only a great live music performance can give. I was thrilled to bits when I heard that Chaurasia is coming to Madras for a concert – and that too free. I took a seat by the aisle that was furthest away from humanity in that auditorium. He started with a slow […]
Dis-concert in Madras
7 History, humour and typical Tamil drama in one of the best Tamil movies ever.
Kamal Hassan’s Anbe Sivam: An underrated classic
Finally found the perfect voice recorder with great clarity, space, battery life and other great features I have tried my hands on four to five voice recorders so far. When I left to India for my fieldwork I was determined to get a good one that matches all my requirements. I will be doing long interviews and attending conferences – so I needed one that has a powerful mic and could record for long durations. When I read or when I work on some topic, I like to record my thoughts as they come. I needed a voice recorder that […]
Perfect voice recorder for fieldwork, interviews, conferences
The best task manager online now goes offline! I have been excited with the prospect of Google Gears that will allow many online applications to be used when we are offline. After the announcement there was a little lull and I was waiting for the products to be rolled out – and the first of them that I have seen is my favourite Task Manager – Remember the milk. With this the task manager can now be used when we are offline as well. Google gears is a product that allows developers to create applications for us to use online […]
Remember the milk available offline with Google Gears
Comparisons are often drawn between the New Deal in USA and the Employment Guarantee Act in India (NREGA). One programme of new deal comes close to NREGA – Civilian Conservation Corps The Government of India passed the all-important National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in 2005 (for an intro click here). Whenever I mention it to my friends in USA the first question they ask me is, “is this like the new-deal”. The new deal has many similarities with NREGA, but is a much wider concept. NREGA is a programme dealing exclusively with labour-intensive, unskilled work. Employment programmes under new […]
America’s New Deal & India’s Employment Guarantee Act
Online news is more than just reading the same stuff online…it’s a great way of comparing how news is presented across different news papers Given that newspapers are our sole source of information on a variety of issues, news bias is a serious issue. In the days of reading on paper, I would subscribe to one, or at most two newspapers and read through them cursorily. But thanks to Google News (and other such news search engines), I now compare the presentation of news across newspapers. Google news puts together articles on a topic from newspapers across the world, and […]
Google News: Advantage of using news readers
Good introductory video on using right to information to combat corruption by Arvind Kejriwal Arvind Kejriwal has been at the heart of an inspiring campaign to combat corruption by using the right to information. He spearheaded a campaign in Delhi along with many other groups that popularised the use of right to information. Arvind got the Magasassay for his work. The videos below contain a talk he gave on using RTI, which I think is a good introductory material for people with an interest on how it could be used, and what it means.
Fighting corruption using right to information: Arvind Kejriwal’s talk
It looks like Government of Bihar has launched a Right to information call centre. Personally, I think this is a great idea, though I dont know how it works at this point. If found a video about it in You Tube that has been widely televised. This is a eight minute clip about that appeals to different groups of people to use it, and gives an idea about how it could be done.
Right to information call centre in Bihar: Video clip
India’s role in countries abroad is something that we do not get to hear much about. It’s role with neighbors is clearly known – but I did not realise that India had played a role in places like Hungary and Congo. A recent article in The Hindu by Jairam Ramesh quotes a president of Hungary saying: “in those months (in 1956), the Indian Embassy in Budapest became the Embassy of the Revolution”. That came as a major surprise to me. I was reading the autobiographical notes of J. K. Galbraith called Ambassador Diaries that he maintained during his stay in […]
India’s role in Hungary, Congo, etc.
Here is your window to some of the best movies in the world, in my perspective. The following ratings are not by a trained movie critic, but by as passionate movie buff. So, if the ratings reflect anything, it reflects my taste. In general, I tend to like movies with good stories, powerful but subtle dialog, good music that’s not conspicuous, acting that’s not overly dramatic and stories that “could have been true”. I thought of putting it together both as record for my own sake and to share a list of movies with those who may share my taste. […]
List of great movies: India and international (brief reviews)
Though I am an intensive user of various features of Google, I was surprised to find that it has an inbuilt calculator that I had not discovered till today. Normally, I open MS Excel painfully or some other application to do simple calculations. I found that one can do these by using the calculator function in Google by using standard methods that one would in Excel. If one has the browser open, it’s a quicker and easier way to get answers than looking for an application.
Google calculator for quick calculations online
Political parties do things in style, and the TN Budget of 2007-2008 was no exception. Among other things, I found the last line of the budget speech interesting. Along with the date in English (23 March 2007), it had a tamil date as Panguni-9, Thiruvalluvar Aandu 2038. Till I read this I did not realise that there is something called Thiruvalluvar aandu – a good discovery from this year’s budget!
TN Budget trivia
Tamil Nadu has many significan policy success stories – in part due to getting the budgetary priorities right We are living in a time when positive media coverage of budget is restricted either to tax cuts or for reducing fiscal deficits. Despite the fact that enormous proportion of India’s GDP is spent by the government, media hardly discusses what governments spend on, and how. State government budgets are crucial to national development given that states are in charge of important areas such as education, health, water, etc. Given my interests, I have closely followed education, health, child care and a few […]
A chirpy note on TN budget 2007-08
Map wy word creates a graphical output of various meanings of a word and enables us to find related words with a click Note: This feature has been disabled in Google Personalize, and visual thesaurus is not a free product anymore I often struggle for words when I am writing long pieces. Beyond a point it becomes boring to use the same word again and again across pages and I desperately start looking for new words to express my ideas. I then started using Wordnet of Princeton University. Wordnet lets me navigate to related words (going beyond synonmys). Apart from […]
Map my word dictionary in Google Personalize
The Tamil Nadu State budget 2007-2008 was presented on 23 March 2007 by Finance Minister Prof. K. Anbazhagan. This page has automatically generated news and analysis on the budget The budget related documents can be found in the website of Tamil Nadu government here. The budget papers for this year have not been updated as yet in this site, but the budget speech can be read here. The webcast of the speech is available here. The speech is conveiniently divided by sections, so incase you are interested in just one section (e.g. Tax, education, social welwafe, etc.), you can easily […]
Tamil Nadu state budget 2007-08: News & Analysis
With some great new improvements Google Personalize is finally something to take seriously The last time I used Google Personalize, it was not a greatly attractive thing. But in a span of few months some new features have been added that make Google Personalize a great online utility that one could use on a day to day basis. To start with, instead of going to google for search, I can set it to go to Google personalize. In that page, I can have snippets of news from selected sources, local weather, my custom search engines, and an assortment of other […]
News, weather, fun with Google Personalize
The finest online task manager can easily be integrated with Google personal home page Google personalize has improved by leaps and bounds in the last year. Apart from a sleek Ajax page where we can drag and drop (and rearrange) various items of our interest, they have now added a “tab system”. Most importantly, it now permits us to “add stuff” that includes an assortment of Google widgets including, remember the milk. To add your tasks from rememberthemilk.com into my Google personalize home page all I have to do is to click on “add stuff” on the top right, and […]