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 […]
Monthly Archives: June 2007
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
Sindhu Bhairavi Year: 1985 Writer: K. Balachander Director: K. Balachander Length: 2 H 50 M Category: Drama Rating: 5 out of 5 A classic Tamil movie that’s almost perfect Sindhu Bhairavi is a rare love story where the relationship between the man and the woman is based on an intellectual craving. JKB, an acclaimed Carnatic singer (played by Sivakumar), has a beautiful wife (played by Sulokshana) who has no knowledge of music or interest in it. He discovers a fan of his – Suhashini – a keenly intelligent woman who thrives on music. Her knowledge of music, willingness to confront […]
Sindhu Bhairavi by Balachander: A treat for every sense
A friend of mine believes that tigers are rational and calculating. If he were a philosopher or an academic of some other brand I would have acquiesced to his argument. But Vinayan and I were in a jungle and we were waging a life and death argument. “Tigers know that if they kill people, people will kill them in turn”, argued Vinayan, “and being rational they will not kill people”. Saying this he urged me to walk into the Jungle as far as we were permitted with the hope of meeting a tiger. Having a rather limited faith in rationality […]
Snakes, Tigers and Crazy Friends
Many good movies have come out of Indians living abroad in the last decade. Monsoon Wedding is highly known, but there is a lot more to look at. Here are five such movies. Most of my American and European friends have seen Monsoon Wedding by Meera Nair. This is by far the most popular movie till today by an Indian director based abroad. But there are many more good movies that are worth watching that are much lesser known. Here’s a quick introduction. The acclaimed Meera Nair has taken quite a few movies. Among these, I am fond of Salaam […]
Lively ‘Desi Movies’: Going beyond Monsoon Wedding
Pertinent questions are being asked about the sustainability of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the US…but the causes and options are not articulated fully Since there is a lot of hullaboo about the “crisis” in social security I tried to find what it’s all about. To my considerable surprise, I found that if the current trends continue, the system will go insolvent in early 2040’s. This kind of foresight in fiscal planning came as a surprise to me – but it is welcome. The crisis is attributed to a demographic shift towards the aged that is going to sharply […]
Are we asking the right questions on Social Security & ...
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 […]