MARTYRED MAJOR Always A Winner
3 Dec 2008, 0006 hrs IST, JANARDHAN ROYE
It was the start of the highly-anticipated and much-hyped, glamour track event of the annual school sports day the 100-metre final. It was to take place in the far corner of the sports field. Smartly dressed staff and students and parents, who could manage to take time off from work or home, had gathered there. Most parents sat in the sprawling shade of the shamiana, fanning themselves with the programme flyer. Then the marquee event of the annual sports was about to start. Almost immediately a great hush fell over the ground. The sprinters in the six lanes crouched, muscles taut, perspiration on brow, waiting to synchronise their forward thrust with the starter's gun. The hot favourite for the race was the head boy. A six-footer popular both on and off the sports field. Now, as the afternoon sun came blazing down on the ground, students in house colours, who had been flitting in and out of the white-chalk marked sports ground, paused and waited. The stern principal, sitting grandly in a blazer and tie, spotted the head boy's mother making her way towards the pavilion. Thanking her for taking time off for the sports, the principal whispered to her, "Would you please give out the first prize to the winner of the 100's?" The unsuspecting mother graciously accepted the honour not for a minute knowing the surprise planned. Just then the starter's gun resonated in the far corner of the ground. Crows leapt out of treetops. With a kick, the runners sped down the marked tracks, pumping arms and legs in a flurry of aesthetical grace and awesome force. Screams, boisterous cheering from the sidelines rent the air. Seconds later, in a dramatic, thrilling finish, the head boy was beaten by a whisker, by his junior. As an upshot the head boy's mother put the gold medal around the neck of the smiling winner on the victory stand and congratulated him and then smiled at the runner-up with "Hi there, son. You did a great job!" Remembering the Bangalore school event of that distant day, some 15 years ago, the head boy, now a techie in San Francisco, says, "I remember the winner clearly very good looking, always smiling, great all-rounder, exceedingly affable, the guy who pipped me at the winning post. Always a winner, that Sandeep Unnikrishnan."
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN: New York Times
On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?
After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.
Pak TV channel says 26/11 hatched by Hindu Zionists
Inki shaklein Hinduonwali hain, jis zabaan mein guftagoo kar rahein hain, woh zabaan koi Pakistani istemaal nahin karta hai (They look like Hindus. No Pakistani speaks the language they chatted in).The Americans executed the 9/11 attack perfectly. They managed the media very well. The Indians tried to repeat the formula but goofed up. The idiots made a complete mess of it
A comment posted about the above pakistani show on timesofindia by a reader:
Infact space aliens are responsible for both 9/11 and 26/11. They have disguised themselves as hindu zionists who are infact islamic terrorists.They are trying to occupy the planet as they need to place to stay. They chose Taj and Oberoi as they are good hotels to live in
Adil Najam on Pakistaniat
But, today, I have no words of analysis. What words can make sense of the patently senseless? I do not know who did this. Nor can I imagine any cause that would justify this. But this I know: No matter who did this, no matter why, the terror that has been wrought in Mumbai is vile and inhuman and unjustifiable. And, for the sake of our own humanness, we must speak out against it.
And, so, to any Mumbaikar who might be listening, I say: “I stand with you today. In prayer and in solidarity.”
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Monday, May 07, 2007
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Passion Lost ?
Did I loose my passion in blogging.I haven't opened my blog for a month.Admit , have a little problem with my English as I am a product of a local Mallu medium school of kyerala.But I was always passionate about writing(Ahem! am I?).
May be it's due to the over stress from the work place.I hardly get time to spend.You may find similarities between this post and my last post ,which was dropped over here last month.Not much difference form there.
Now a days I hardly find any news which pulls me into.Or ,Is there any change in the behavior of the world.Things have become routine.It appears that all the events happening in the world are manufactured and marketed by this media. Are we becoming fools by dipping our head into it?
I don't know .I don't know ,I don't know.
May be it's due to the over stress from the work place.I hardly get time to spend.You may find similarities between this post and my last post ,which was dropped over here last month.Not much difference form there.
Now a days I hardly find any news which pulls me into.Or ,Is there any change in the behavior of the world.Things have become routine.It appears that all the events happening in the world are manufactured and marketed by this media. Are we becoming fools by dipping our head into it?
I don't know .I don't know ,I don't know.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
In the month of september
This month was really different .Lot's of things have happened inside me(inside me? is that a correct usage?...depends,naah?).I have deviated from my aims.Started doubtfully staring at my goals .Had to undergo a minor surgery.
The fear about time has increased as like never before.In some days I woke up from my bed late in the night.Was not getting proper sleep on many days.I felt... the time is moving fast with a stop watch put near by.Seconds and minutes are changing rapidly.And I am doing nothing.Days and weeks are passing quickly... And I am doing nothing.The fear....the agony and the ecstasy....all types of emotions started rolling on me suddenly and unexpectedly....Am I getting slightly mad?
Each days are exact clones of the previous.Night is the only blockage of an otherwise continuous living.I was not posting in my blog for the last one month...Yes ,I feel...my priorities are changing.
Otherwise you may have to start a new journey from here.
The fear about time has increased as like never before.In some days I woke up from my bed late in the night.Was not getting proper sleep on many days.I felt... the time is moving fast with a stop watch put near by.Seconds and minutes are changing rapidly.And I am doing nothing.Days and weeks are passing quickly... And I am doing nothing.The fear....the agony and the ecstasy....all types of emotions started rolling on me suddenly and unexpectedly....Am I getting slightly mad?
Each days are exact clones of the previous.Night is the only blockage of an otherwise continuous living.I was not posting in my blog for the last one month...Yes ,I feel...my priorities are changing.
Otherwise you may have to start a new journey from here.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Bangalore: Hot and Hotter
I came to read this article by chance.The author is Tom Fidermann who is one of the most respected columnists in the world.If I recall correctly, once he had participated in the "Big Fight" of NDTV which was telecasted from Davos during the Davos summit.I guess the topic was "will India ever overtake China". He had made some interesting comments about both the countries. According to him due to the single party system,in China many good things can be started without any opposition.In India due to the democratic system , good policies may have to be reverted , but terribly bad things would never happen.
Have a look at his article.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 8, 2005
Every time I visit India, Indians always ask me to compare India with China. Lately, I have responded like this: If India and China were both highways, the Chinese highway would be a six-lane, perfectly paved road, but with a huge speed bump off in the distance labeled "Political reform: how in the world do we get from Communism to a more open society?" When 1.3 billion people going 80 miles an hour hit a speed bump, one of two things happens: Either the car flies into the air and slams down, and all the parts hold together and it keeps on moving - or the car flies into the air, slams down and all the wheels fall off. Which it will be with China, I don’t know. India, by contrast, is like a highway full of potholes, with no sidewalks and half the streetlamps broken. But off in the distance, the road seems to smooth out, and if it does, this country will be a dynamo. The question is: Is that smoother road in the distance a mirage or the real thing?
At first blush, coming back to Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, that smoother road seems like a mirage. The infrastructure here is still a total mess. But looks can be deceiving. Beneath the mess, Bangalore is entering a mature new phase as a technology center by starting to produce its own high-tech products, research, venture capital firms and start-ups.
"The ecosystem for innovation is now starting to be created here," said Nandan Nilekani, the C.E.O. of Infosys. For several years now, when venture capitalists funded companies in the U.S., they insisted that the R.&D. for the products be done in India. But now, increasingly, Western companies will come up with a new idea and then tell Infosys, Wipro or Tata, India’s premier technology companies, to research, develop and produce the whole thing.
As one Wipro executive put it, "You go from solving my problem to serving my business to knowing my business to being my business." What will be left for the Western companies is the "ideation," the original concept and design of a flagship product (which is a big deal), and then the sales and marketing.
"We’re going from a model of doing piecework to where the entire product and entire innovation stream is done by companies here," Mr. Nilekani added. All of this means that innovation will happen faster and cheaper, with much more global collaboration.
The best indication that Bangalore is becoming hot is how many foreign techies - non-Indians - are now coming here to work. P. Anandan, an Indian-American who worked for Microsoft for 28 years in Redmond, Wash., just opened Microsoft’s research center in Bangalore, which follows the ones in Redmond, Cambridge and Beijing.
"I have two non-Indians working for me here, one Japanese and one American, and they could work anywhere in the world," Mr. Anandan said. He added that when he got his engineering degree in India 28 years ago, all the competition was to get a job abroad. Now the fiercest competition is to get an I.T. job in India: "It is no longer, ’Well I have to stay here,’ but, ’Do I get a chance to stay here?’ "
In the past year, Infosys received 9,600 applications from abroad, including from China, France and Germany, for internships, and it accepted 100. I asked one of these interns, Vicki Chen, a Chinese-American business student from the Claremont Colleges, why she came. "All the business is coming to India, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t follow the business," she said. "If this is where the center of gravity is, you should go check it out, and then you become more valuable."
Even more interesting is how Indian firms are taking the skills they learned from outsourcing and using them to develop low-cost products for the low-wage Indian market: a medical insurance plan for the poor for as little as $10 a year, a $2,000 car, a $200 laptop, supercheap cellphones, a low-fare airline ($75 one-way for the three-hour Bangalore-Delhi flight) that sells tickets from Internet kiosks in gas stations. Indian companies know that if they can make money producing low-cost technology for poor Indians, it gives them an incredible platform to then take these products global. (Imagine the profit potential if they work in the West?) China is doing the exact same thing.
Indeed, I now understand why, when China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, visited India for the first time last April, he didn’t fly into the capital, New Delhi - as foreign leaders usually do. He flew directly from Beijing to Bangalore - for a tech-tour - and then went on to New Delhi.
No U.S. president or vice president has ever visited Bangalore.
PS: Ask the US Congress to invite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to address a Joint Session of Congress. Sign petition
Have a look at his article.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 8, 2005
Every time I visit India, Indians always ask me to compare India with China. Lately, I have responded like this: If India and China were both highways, the Chinese highway would be a six-lane, perfectly paved road, but with a huge speed bump off in the distance labeled "Political reform: how in the world do we get from Communism to a more open society?" When 1.3 billion people going 80 miles an hour hit a speed bump, one of two things happens: Either the car flies into the air and slams down, and all the parts hold together and it keeps on moving - or the car flies into the air, slams down and all the wheels fall off. Which it will be with China, I don’t know. India, by contrast, is like a highway full of potholes, with no sidewalks and half the streetlamps broken. But off in the distance, the road seems to smooth out, and if it does, this country will be a dynamo. The question is: Is that smoother road in the distance a mirage or the real thing?
At first blush, coming back to Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, that smoother road seems like a mirage. The infrastructure here is still a total mess. But looks can be deceiving. Beneath the mess, Bangalore is entering a mature new phase as a technology center by starting to produce its own high-tech products, research, venture capital firms and start-ups.
"The ecosystem for innovation is now starting to be created here," said Nandan Nilekani, the C.E.O. of Infosys. For several years now, when venture capitalists funded companies in the U.S., they insisted that the R.&D. for the products be done in India. But now, increasingly, Western companies will come up with a new idea and then tell Infosys, Wipro or Tata, India’s premier technology companies, to research, develop and produce the whole thing.
As one Wipro executive put it, "You go from solving my problem to serving my business to knowing my business to being my business." What will be left for the Western companies is the "ideation," the original concept and design of a flagship product (which is a big deal), and then the sales and marketing.
"We’re going from a model of doing piecework to where the entire product and entire innovation stream is done by companies here," Mr. Nilekani added. All of this means that innovation will happen faster and cheaper, with much more global collaboration.
The best indication that Bangalore is becoming hot is how many foreign techies - non-Indians - are now coming here to work. P. Anandan, an Indian-American who worked for Microsoft for 28 years in Redmond, Wash., just opened Microsoft’s research center in Bangalore, which follows the ones in Redmond, Cambridge and Beijing.
"I have two non-Indians working for me here, one Japanese and one American, and they could work anywhere in the world," Mr. Anandan said. He added that when he got his engineering degree in India 28 years ago, all the competition was to get a job abroad. Now the fiercest competition is to get an I.T. job in India: "It is no longer, ’Well I have to stay here,’ but, ’Do I get a chance to stay here?’ "
In the past year, Infosys received 9,600 applications from abroad, including from China, France and Germany, for internships, and it accepted 100. I asked one of these interns, Vicki Chen, a Chinese-American business student from the Claremont Colleges, why she came. "All the business is coming to India, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t follow the business," she said. "If this is where the center of gravity is, you should go check it out, and then you become more valuable."
Even more interesting is how Indian firms are taking the skills they learned from outsourcing and using them to develop low-cost products for the low-wage Indian market: a medical insurance plan for the poor for as little as $10 a year, a $2,000 car, a $200 laptop, supercheap cellphones, a low-fare airline ($75 one-way for the three-hour Bangalore-Delhi flight) that sells tickets from Internet kiosks in gas stations. Indian companies know that if they can make money producing low-cost technology for poor Indians, it gives them an incredible platform to then take these products global. (Imagine the profit potential if they work in the West?) China is doing the exact same thing.
Indeed, I now understand why, when China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, visited India for the first time last April, he didn’t fly into the capital, New Delhi - as foreign leaders usually do. He flew directly from Beijing to Bangalore - for a tech-tour - and then went on to New Delhi.
No U.S. president or vice president has ever visited Bangalore.
PS: Ask the US Congress to invite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to address a Joint Session of Congress. Sign petition
Friday, August 04, 2006
Keshav's cartoon on Israel_Lebenon crisis
Keshav is a well known cartoonist of India who is very famous for his sharp and critique cartoons.He is associating with The Hindu.
Friday, July 28, 2006
The Neocon Resurgence and Israel Lebenon Crisis
Today I have found an intersesting piece in "The Hindu" about Israel-Lebenon war.Every one knows Israel is a program sponsored by US. And almost all the US media is strongly biased towards Israel.According to them Israel is a civilized society and they would not do cheap tactics like extraditions which they are ascribing to Hizbollah.I am not going to state Hizbollah is a legitimate troupe.But we can't deny the fact that it's a very much accepted wing in Lebenon. It has a military wing as well as a political wing.
All these current problems happened due to the kidnapping of Israel soldiers buy Hezbollah.But nobody in US seems to be aware about the facts that lead Hezbollah to do so. According to Hezbollah sources,they are forced to do so as a bargain tactic to release the Lebenese women and kids from the Israel prisons. When somebody raised this point,I have seen comments from Americans in US forums alleging these women and kids as supporters of terrorism.
In this context the article which was originally published in gaurdian will be worth a read.
Have a look ..
ONCE AGAIN the Bush administration is floating on a wave of euphoria. Israel's offensive against Hizbollah in Lebanon has liberated the utopian strain of neoconservatism that had been traduced by Iraq's sectarian civil war. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has propelled herself forward as chief cheerleader. "What we're seeing here," she said, "are the birth pangs of a new Middle East." At every press conference she repeats the phrase "a new Middle East" as though its incantation is magical.
Her jaunt to the region is intended to lend the appearance of diplomacy in order to forestall it. As explained to me by several senior State Department officials, Ms. Rice is entranced by a new "domino theory": Israel's attacks will demolish Hizbollah; the Lebanese will blame Hizbollah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to Hamas, which will collapse. From the administration's point of view, this is a proxy war with Iran (and Syria) that will inexplicably help turn around Iraq. "We will prevail," Ms. Rice says.
The administration has traditionally engaged in threat conflation — Al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein, North Korea and Iran in "the axis of evil," and now implicitly the Shia Hizbollah with the Sunni Iraqi insurgency. By asserting "we" before "will prevail," Ms. Rice is engaging in national interest conflation.
This week has seen the publication of Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks, the military correspondent of The Washington Post, devastating in its factual deconstruction. The Iraqi invasion, he writes, was "based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history." The policy-making at the Pentagon was a "black hole," and resistance by the staff of the joint chiefs to disinformation linking Iraq to 9/11 was dismissed. After the absence of a plan for post-war Iraq, blunder upon blunder fostered the insurgency.
In one of its most unintentionally ironic curiosities, the Bush White House has created an Office of Lessons Learned. But the thinking that made possible the catastrophe in Iraq is not a subject of this office. The delusional mindset went underground only to surface through the crack of the current crisis.
There are no lessons learned about the blowback from Iraq; about Iraq's condemnation of Israel and its sympathy for Hizbollah; or about the U.S. unwillingness to deal with the Palestinian Authority that made inevitable the rise of Hamas; or the counter-productive repudiation of direct contact with Syria and Iran.
Indeed, Ms. Rice is ushering in "a new Middle East," one in which the U.S. is distrusted and even hated by traditional Arab allies, and its ability to restrain Israel while negotiating on behalf of its security is relinquished and diminished. —
All these current problems happened due to the kidnapping of Israel soldiers buy Hezbollah.But nobody in US seems to be aware about the facts that lead Hezbollah to do so. According to Hezbollah sources,they are forced to do so as a bargain tactic to release the Lebenese women and kids from the Israel prisons. When somebody raised this point,I have seen comments from Americans in US forums alleging these women and kids as supporters of terrorism.
In this context the article which was originally published in gaurdian will be worth a read.
Have a look ..
ONCE AGAIN the Bush administration is floating on a wave of euphoria. Israel's offensive against Hizbollah in Lebanon has liberated the utopian strain of neoconservatism that had been traduced by Iraq's sectarian civil war. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has propelled herself forward as chief cheerleader. "What we're seeing here," she said, "are the birth pangs of a new Middle East." At every press conference she repeats the phrase "a new Middle East" as though its incantation is magical.
Her jaunt to the region is intended to lend the appearance of diplomacy in order to forestall it. As explained to me by several senior State Department officials, Ms. Rice is entranced by a new "domino theory": Israel's attacks will demolish Hizbollah; the Lebanese will blame Hizbollah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to Hamas, which will collapse. From the administration's point of view, this is a proxy war with Iran (and Syria) that will inexplicably help turn around Iraq. "We will prevail," Ms. Rice says.
The administration has traditionally engaged in threat conflation — Al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein, North Korea and Iran in "the axis of evil," and now implicitly the Shia Hizbollah with the Sunni Iraqi insurgency. By asserting "we" before "will prevail," Ms. Rice is engaging in national interest conflation.
This week has seen the publication of Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks, the military correspondent of The Washington Post, devastating in its factual deconstruction. The Iraqi invasion, he writes, was "based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history." The policy-making at the Pentagon was a "black hole," and resistance by the staff of the joint chiefs to disinformation linking Iraq to 9/11 was dismissed. After the absence of a plan for post-war Iraq, blunder upon blunder fostered the insurgency.
In one of its most unintentionally ironic curiosities, the Bush White House has created an Office of Lessons Learned. But the thinking that made possible the catastrophe in Iraq is not a subject of this office. The delusional mindset went underground only to surface through the crack of the current crisis.
There are no lessons learned about the blowback from Iraq; about Iraq's condemnation of Israel and its sympathy for Hizbollah; or about the U.S. unwillingness to deal with the Palestinian Authority that made inevitable the rise of Hamas; or the counter-productive repudiation of direct contact with Syria and Iran.
Indeed, Ms. Rice is ushering in "a new Middle East," one in which the U.S. is distrusted and even hated by traditional Arab allies, and its ability to restrain Israel while negotiating on behalf of its security is relinquished and diminished. —
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