Blog Trek, the next generation

The English Plurals -by George Carlin

2012-01-17T06:33:00.000+05:30

The English Plural
according to ....

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes;
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese;

(there's more!)

You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen ?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet ?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth ?

Then one may be that, & three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose;
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother & also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his & him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis & shim !

Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England.

We take English for granted,
but if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work slowly,
boxing rings are square;
A guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
Why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing,
Grocers don't groce & hammers don't ham ?

Doesn't it seem crazy that ...
you can make amends but not one amend ?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends ...
and get rid of all but one of them,
What do you call it ?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught ?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables,
what does a humanitarian eat ?

Sometimes I think all people who speak English
Should be in an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play,
and play at a recital ?

We ship by truck but send cargo by ship ...
We have noses that run & feet that smell;
We park in a driveway & drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance & a fat chance be the same,
while a wise man & a wise guy are opposites ?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
in which your house can burn up as it burns down;
In which you fill in a form by filling it out,
& in which an alarm goes off by going on.

And in closing ....
If Father is Pop ....
how come Mother's not Mop ? ? ? ?

dr.bipin doshi

Opinion: How Organized Religion causes Oppressive Regimes (and the other way around!)

2012-01-14T08:01:00.000+05:30

Republishing (with some polishing) a comment to a question someone posted on FB:

Is there a correlation between religion being divine and theocracies being oppressive regimes?

My reply:

A religious tendency to trust and depend on in a higher authority for answers to the puzzling questions of life (often with unquestionable faith getting diverted to religious institutions that are made of fallible and corruptible men and not Gods)...

...translates into implicit trust without expectation of accountability in the governing authority who claim to know what's best for everyone. Take the cyclical and often disastrous assumption that whatever the ruling authority has done in any case is assumed to be good only because they are the ruling authority and we assume that they will only do what is best for their people. The dangerous part in this assumption is that the facts on the ground and data are completely ignored and we're simply floating on assumptions.

This is why scientific thinking and advancement ,which takes away the power of religious institutions by finding the answers to those puzzling questions through repeatable experimentation and proof and finding solutions to them as well, empowering the common man in the process, (example: using internet any human can now reach out his thoughts to millions of people at zero expense or communicate with anyone in the world with a tiny object in his hand : feats that would be considered as divine 100 years ago) ...

...has often also ended up diluting the powers of oppressive regimes (like what the Internet and mobiles did to Egypt and Tunisia).

I would definitely say there is a strong corelation between the scientific method and people's empowerment.

Belgian cyclist on a world cycling and documentary tour at my place!

2012-01-14T07:02:00.001+05:30

While on my way back from school day before yesterday, I came across a strange cyclist in the midst of the traffic. I can't really describe in words so attaching a picture.

So, he's Henri Vivegnis from Belgium. When I drew up alongside him and enquired about his bike, he showed me an address "Marathon Bahavan" - it was right around the corner and I guided him to the place.

And then being the nosy Gujju I am, I found out everything about him. He's from Belgium, and is on a world tour by cycle, attending Film Festivals.

http://www.docuworldtour.be

And he's attending this for the next 3 days in Pune:

http://www.puneinternationalfilmfestival.com

He has cycled from Mumbai to Pune and after this he's going to cycle to Delhi.

I offered to accommodate him in case he doesn't have any place to go, and so he's at my place right now. Grateful to my Didi for being a gracious host coz I've been gone out most of the time over the last 2 days.

So, reaching out to all the cycling enthusiasts and those who want to show some hospitality : Please reach out! My situation at home isn't the very best right now and we have problems in arranging for proper food for his palate, and are having to depend on outside food. If someone can accommodate him or even just spend time with him it would be awesome! The film festival is from 9am to 7pm everyday and he's free outside those hours.

Also, HELP NEEDED for figuring out a way for our guest to cycle all the way from Pune to Delhi without getting killed! Has anyone out there done a similar car/bike ride??

At least let's meet up to check out the cool bike!!

Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250

Values

2012-01-08T23:07:00.000+05:30

Do our children know how to count.... their blessings?

Can they read... between the lines?

Can they comprehend... the feelings of others?

Can they find the solutions to... the problems that haven't been solved yet?

Can they draw... a better future for everybody?

Can they question... the status quo?

Can they identify... the faults in the conventional methods?

Can they understand... the circumstances that determined a person's actions?

Can they predict... the consequences of their actions, and more importantly, of their inaction?

Can they determine... the true intentions behind the spoken ones?

Can they imagine... being in the other person's shoes?

Can they find... the facts and not just make assumptions?

Can they figure out... what will be the right thing to do?

Can our adults do all of the above?

Value education... educate values.

Offline Wikipedia for Indian Schools

2012-01-05T16:29:00.000+05:30

Dear Friends,

A veteran wikipedian in Pune, Ashwin Baindur, has started an ambitious project to compile a free offline digital encyclopedia for spreading to schools and homes all over India. This project will source the articles from wikipedia but will be child-friendly and available to use without any internet connection, and can run on even the slowest "dabba" PCs commonly seen in our government and low-income schools. More details in the forwarded email below.

Once compiled, spreading it will be as easy as sharing movies with your buddies - plug in a pen drive and Ctrl+C (copy), Ctrl+V (paste). If taken up passionately and spread virally, we can bridge the digital divide and bring a huge trove of knowledge to kids and teachers all over the nation who have never seen anything like it before.

How you can help: Go to:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AssY5vZfk1W5dEpGRGdPNl9VbFY0LW9sS1A5ODBzbkE#gid=0

.. read what is written there and start chipping in with article requests. This project is still in the compiling stage and needs your help. You need to think aloud and contribute the names of any and every India-specific thing that you can think of : places, people, festivals, culture, wildlife - whatever you think is a good general knowledge source that ought to be accessible to every student in India. You don't need to have any technical expertise to help here - just type in and you're done. There's space for over 3000 articles here, so be generous - jo bheje mein aaya daal do, editing koi aur lega.

The above link is just a google doc I created that'll make things easy for novices. If you want to go to the main page, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Offline_Wikipedia_for_Indian_Schools/Offline_Full#Request_an_Article

Timeline

The OWIS project can take anywhere from a few months to a couple of years to complete, depending on how many volunteers can get involved. So, as Kiran Bir Sethi has advised, share shamelessly.

Meanwhile, if you want to put the existing and ready "Wikipedia for Schools" offline encyclopedia that has over 6000 GK articles (but not many Indian ones hence OWIS) into the computers in your school and community, then you can download it from here: http://www.kiwix.org (2.7 GB) and contact me if any doubts. Read about it here. I put that in along with several other free resources in a rural school run by Manav Sadhana in Gandhinagar as part of a volunteer activity around Christmas 2011, I wish I had pics of the way the teachers' faces lit up when they saw it! :)

Cheers,

Nikhil ShethGrade 3 Teacher
Lt. Smt. Shantabai Ladkat School, Nanapeth
Pune, India
TEACH FOR INDIA Fellow, 2011-13
http://www.facebook.com/nikjs

------------------

From: Ashwin Baindur
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Announcing - WikiProject Offline Wikipedia for Indian Schools

ANNOUNCING A NEW WIKIPROJECT

(WikiProject Offline Wikipedia for Indian Schools)

Dear friends,

This is to announce the beginning of a new project for WikiProject India - WikiProject Offline Wikipedia for Indian Schools (OWIS). For quite some time now, there has been a need for an offline wikipedia compilation suitable to Indian schools. There are, and have always been, a whole lot of Indian schools and students out there who do not have access to an English encyclopedia. The web has killed off a whole range of printed encyclopedias and factbooks besides paid encyclopedia packages such as Encarta. If the school does not provide wide-spread, regular and dependable access to the web. then the students have zilch. So, keeping in mind that English Wikipedia has been around for more than a decade and has more than enough material for an encyclopedia, we began this project so that all interested people could pitch in and collectively prepare such offline compilations which are the need of the hour.

About the Wikiproject

To do this, we began a new WikiProject in English Wikipedia, daughter to WikiProject India. Titled WikiProject Offline Wikipedia for Indian Schools (OWIS), it is intended to be the umbrella WikiProject for all Indian versions of offline English language wikipedias for students and communities. The WikiProject will concentrate on content issues and leave the production to a team of technically oriented guys from the community (to be decided later).

You can read about the WikiProject page here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Offline_Wikipedia_for_Indian_Schools

Under this WikiProject, it is proposed to provide a variety of compilations suitable for various needs, such as a full offline encyclopedia, single disc collations on topics related to India etc.

The first project

To begin with, we felt it is best to create a single DVD compilation with all subjects covered in sufficient detail. We have named it as Offline Wikipedia for Indian Schools (Full version) or OWIS-FULL (in short).

It is based on and will be similar to the SOS Children's Village Offline Wikipedia for School which you can checkout for yourself at this link:

http://schools-wikipedia.org/

The project page for this first project is here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Offline_Wikipedia_for_Indian_Schools/Offline_Full

The SOS village compilation is CD based with approximately 6500 articles based on the British educational syllabus. Naturally, it contains a large number of topics relevant only to the UK and has a distinct Western flavour in its overall choice too, which is only natural.

To make this compilation suitable for our environment, we will have to not only add a whole host of new articles on Indian topics to the compilation but also remove topics/articles irrelevant to Indian students. In addition, the SOS Children's Encyclopaedia, being in existence for the last few years, is designed to fit on a CD with the consequence that the number of articles on a subject cover a subject satisfactorily but skimpily. Since we plan our compilation to be on a DVD, there is scope to improve coverage on all subjects as well. Hence it is planned to have in the region of around 9000 articles.

So where are we now? As a first step we have established the framework in the form of the WikiProject and pages where one can work. The list of topics from the SOS compilation has been prepared subjectwise. These lists need to be vetted/improved/extended and then finalised.

As of now, six subjects have been opened up for topic selection - Art, IT, Maths, Physics, Biology and Chemistry. We need motivated editors to join the teams and pitch in. The selection of topics needs to be completed in ten days time so that we can move on to other subjects, other tasks.

So, if this venture interests you, if you want to do something really important with us, if you agree with our proposition that this is critical for delivering the potential of Wikipedia to digitally-challenged communities, sign up here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Offline_Wikipedia_for_Indian_Schools/Offline_Full#Members

All the best to all of us to successfully complete this vital project.

This email is being reflected on Wikimedia India list for information. But If you would like to respond to this, please respond to on the English Wikipedia for India mailing list -

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-in-en

Everyone is welcome to subscribe to it.

Ashwin Baindur

_______________________________________________

Wikimediaindia-l mailing list

Emmanuel's Visit

2012-01-04T17:26:00.001+05:30

Shantabai Ladkat English Medium School, Nanapeth Pune had a unique visitor in November 2011. Emmanuel Engelhart from Switzerland is the creator of a program called "Kiwix" which runs "Wikipedia for Schools", a digital encyclopedia that runs on any computer, has over 6000 articles equal to 20 large encyclopedias. And it is completely free of charge, made to spread to schools for the benefit of teachers and students.

Our school was one of the first in India to install and use this wealth of knowledge in our computer lab. So Emmanuel came to Pune specially to meet us and spent two full days interacting with all the students and the teachers, seeing his program in action in our lab and he even taught us a little French. We held a special ceremony for him to convey our gratitude for his noble and selfless work in the field of education that can empower millions of students all over the nation.

Addiction Vs Entrepreneurship

2011-12-25T18:43:00.000+05:30

I found this quote on FB:

To feel superior to a self-destructive drug addict is the same as feeling superior to an entrepreneur whose enterprise has failed and burdened him with debt. They were both people who wished to experiment with new things. And some experiments fail. That's all there is to it. It doesn't give you the right to look down on them. They are no less human than you are.

Totally agree with the core message: We must treat everyone as humans. But, I think it was patronizing a little too much with the addict. Basically it reminded me about how people keep justifying addictions by saying things like "try something new once in a while" or "you should be open to experimentation!" and similar stuff. And that makes this a dangerous analogy, as it has one very critical flaw yet on the surface looks true and may even encourage people to enter into addiction in the spirit of freedom, experimentation and entrepreneurship. Indeed, it has. So, I commented to explain why the two are not similar...

There might be one slight devil in the details. The entrepreneur tried to do something that had NEVER been done before by anyone - for that is what entrepreneurship is. If there were already so many cases floating around of that exact same thing having been tried by others only to result in disastrous consequences, then that means our entrepreneur never learned from the world around him.

In which case he deserves to have failed and get indebted - you can't repeat a business idea as-is that's already been proven bad, it's stupid.

The drug-addict is REPEATING the exact same thing which 1000s of others before him have tried. It's not like he's pinching the needle in from a different angle so that's a novel concept. He's repeating someone else's experiment and he knows what the results are going to be. So if the bad entrepreneur deserved what he got, then what about the drug addict? Stupid is as stupid does :P

I guess it all hinges on what we define as "new" - new to just the person in question, or new to everyone?

--So, my message: Kids, don't fall for the lure of trying out these things in the spirit of doing something new. It is NOT something new. You're only copying 1000s of other people. By taking a whiff of a cigarette, a peg of alcohol or a snort or needle of a drug, you ain't doin' anything new, man. You're just being as stupid as the other idiots. You're copying an idiot's experiment! Are you really that boring?! If you want to do something NEW, something FRESH, do what a real Entrepreneur does - try something that has never been tried before by anyone around you.

Addiction = boring and old; not new. Be cool. Try something really new. Peace!

cross-post: "you should date an illiterate girl"

2011-12-20T22:12:00.000+05:30

Can't help but cross-post this article - it sums up perfectly the chasm between "dream girl" and "dream woman" - it sums up perfectly what I can't stand about my fellow men and women - it sums up perfectly what I wish more women would be like if only this world would let them!

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/dont-date-a-girl-who-reads/

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl
Jan. 19, 2011
By Charles Warnke
Charles Warnke is a 21 year-old writer based out of Berkeley, California.
Read more »
Date a girl who doesn't read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you've seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.
Let the anxious contract you've unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn't fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.
Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you've never been happier. If she doesn't, smile all the same.
Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn't read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

PAGE 2 (where the revelation hits!)
Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.
Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.
Date a girl who doesn't read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.
Don't date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

A 12V DC home

2011-12-20T19:27:00.000+05:30

Since my days in electrical engineering, this question has been bothering me: Most of the devices at our home that need electricity, need low-voltage DC power, not 230Volts AC.

The ones that do, are either run on AC just because DC isn't readily available (ceiling fans, washing machines, vacuum cleaners)..

..Or can now be succeeded by next-gen devices with far better performance and lower power consumption (CRT Vs. LCD displays, fluorescent tubelights Vs oLEDs)...

..And the rest are simple resistive circuits that run on both - including the traditional light bulbs, water heaters, kettles, toasters.

In fact, I'd say the only real uses of high voltage grid AC power supply are industrial ones where 3-phase synchronous motors and the like are needed. Homes and shops and offices : why bother?

The appliances we use at home usually have most of their weight in a hefty step-down transformer sitting inside the casing that converts the supplied power into a much safer 12 Volts, which is then converted into DC by AC-DC converter circuits. Crack open a computer's SMPS or a kitchen mixer or a TV and you'll find one inside. Laptop charger cords and mobile charger cords now have lighter electronic converters (albeit with a much shorter lifespan)
.
But now, a neighborhood biogas plant, a local wind turbine, a fuel cell, a solar panel can directly supply that low-voltage DC power! But unfortunately the electrical appliance industry today designs all products in a way that we need 230V AC (In India - in some other countries there is 110V also which is quite stupid as plugging into the wrong socket causes several faults, malfunctions and fires).

It's just so ridiculous, seeing that the AC-DC conversion results in inefficiency and power wastage! (and you can feel that in your power adapter heating up). If you wanted to switch to an off-grid electric supply today, you'd have to contend with this mind-boggling multi-step wastage:
1. Take the renewable-generated power and store it in a battery - WASTE POWER but unavoidable unless you're using fuel cells or your biogas turbine runs 24/7
2. Convert the electric power from LV DC to HV AC using an inverter - WASTE POWER
3. At the appliance end, convert the HV AC back to LV DC - WASTE POWER.

No wonder the entire grid power industry keeps gloating that getting off the grid is impractical - the present system we've been using since some decades makes it impractical for no fault of the poor little wind turbine or solar panel! And here we're not even looking at the issues of the actual things that are generating the power - it's purely the conventional systems at the user end that's wasting half the power away!

If the designers and the industry had had the foresight and had included an alternate DC supply socket in every electrical appliance that actually uses DC on the inside, then every home could have readily switched to off-grid renewable energy. Instead, the few expensive examples we see today, probably waste half of the renewable energy put in.

But the industry has locked us in.

So now I'm foreseeing a major demand cropping up for an industry in parallel with the rise of local renewable power replacing the grid : an industry that will re-wire and retrofit all existing electrical appliances to include a DC power socket. In most cases this will be as simple as drilling a hole in the casing and fitting a socket that will skip the transformer/converter sections and hook up directly with the device. Some rudimentary over-voltage and polarity protection will also be in order - but at the low voltages like 12V, it's easily doable. It's very simple, but essential for the concept of off-grid homes to turn to reality.

An offshoot of this: Say goodbye to the eternal safety hazard of the electric socket and switch. A person or child accidentally touching both terminals of a 12V DC outlet will NOT suffer intense burns; a short-circuit at this low level of voltage will be cut out by the protection system long before there can be any fire hazard (unlike 230V AC where the spark can burn someone or set things on fire and only AFTER the spark does the protection fuse kick in). The main fusebox, etc will longer be a very very dangerous place in the house. This "side-effect" of converting a home from AC to DC can be marketed as a major safety enhancement for the family.

Of course, it doesn't have to be this or that - we can have a transition model having both LV-DC and AC sockets available. Several homes in areas of frequent power cuts employ an inverter system anyway which kicks in when the power is out, replicates the 230V AC supply from the battery storage and powers most of the house sockets. In fact, these houses are great potential off-grid converts as you simply have to hook up the renewable power source with the existing battery and extend circuits from there to give DC power outlets to the whole house.

A house with DC sockets and appliances running directly off it - hoping I get to see this idea converted into reality some day!

HOW TO deploy Wikipedia for Schools offline encylopedia on school computers

2011-12-16T00:29:00.001+05:30

Bridge the internet divide; spread the light of knowledge to school computers the same way you share movies and songs with your friends: with Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and a few clicks!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AOffline_Wikipedia_install_guide.pdf

Thanks to Jessie and Emmanuel for their support and faith; it's an honor to be collaborating with you on this project!

Nikhil Sheth,
Teach for India Fellow, 2011-13
Grade 3 teacher, Shantabai Ladkat School, Nanapeth, Pune

The junior's turn

2011-12-13T21:31:00.001+05:30

A bus loaded with passengers and a collection of senior and junior drivers is speeding towards a cliff. The senior drivers are all roundly criticized for having driven them in that direction, for never having learned to turn the wheel or use the brakes, and for having ignored earlier pleas of the more tech-savvy passengers who'd looked up their GPS and figured things out before they did. But now that the cliff is finally visible, all the passengers want the bus to halt, turn around and get back to safety.

However, the junior drivers are now at the wheel and they say it's their turn to push the accelerator; and they haven't been taught by the seniors to do anything else. They're only focused on "their turn", are pushing the accelerator more than ever before, and are oblivious to the fact that the whole bus is going to plunge over unless they stop mindlessly mimicking their seniors' past actions. They're also busy blaming the senior drivers along with everyone else, but don't want to make any changes on their part.

The junior drivers are the government-industrial complexes of India and China and some more developing nations. The senior drivers are pretty much irrelevant by now. The bus is our planet. The rest you extrapolate.

friendship Vs love in a venn diagram

2011-12-10T00:36:00.001+05:30

Hoping that one day we can understand one another.

Distance makes the heart...

2011-11-04T13:15:00.002+05:30

For men:

Proximity makes the heart grow fonder,
Distance makes the heart look yonder.

For women:

Distance makes the heart grow fonder,
Proximity makes her want a brother.

Yes, this post is a joke, a pot-shot, a jibe. Probably just more crap from me. Absolutely untrue. DEFINITELY not true in your case at least...

But tell that to all the women who only realized how much they miss and long for that one friend only after the poor chap has already given up, made drastic changes to his life and gone away.

Tell it to the women who desperately cling on to their long distance relationships, make themselves impervious to all other influences, stay ever faithful, only to find out much later that their beau's gotten bored of this dedicated routine and wants to move on.

And finally,tell that to all the guys whose female buddies / colleagues / classmates (who they worked with, talked with, grew to respect, appreciate, admire and gradually start to like) turned them into brothers or parked them forever in "the friend zone".

No more dead dinosaurs, sorry!

2011-11-03T20:52:00.002+05:30

(just read a "breaking news: petrol price hike by another 2rs/lit on TOI)
Ok enough talk and theories. Time to put the foot to the pedal.

www.abdn.ac.uk

Petrol prices are never coming back down, people. Even if we removed all the taxes and the surcharges that these email fwds complain about, there IS NOT ENOUGH PETROLEUM IN THE WORLD FOR INDIA's demand or for any other country - there were only that many dead dinosaurs in the ground and we've burned most of them off.

(for the slow : That is correct. Petrol that powers your cars and bikes is actually extracted from the decomposed dead bodies of dinosaurs and other animals and plants that lived and died millions of years ago. In case you did not know that little yucky detail. That is why it is called a Fossil Fuel. Did you think it was coming from your oily neighbor's head??)

There were no infinite generations of dinosaurs. They died out, I'm sorry. There is no infinite petroleum. All the money in the world will not make any more of it for you. If you'd like to start now, there is a 65~100 million year waiting period. Just consider yourself lucky that the animals who died at the time were buried rather than cremated upon death.

The age of petrol is over. Transition or suffer.

(edit: ok, for the sake of accuracy, petrol is more from dead sea creatures than dinosaurs, statistically speaking. But the dinosaur tag sends the message home. See the image below for a quick explanation)

www.ei.lehigh.edu

yep... we've been running the modern world off the desecration of our ancestors' graves... and actually imagining an infinite supply of dead bodies being stored under the ground... reminds me of Draupadis' vastaharan scene in Mahabharat, only this time it's Duryodhan who's praying that the sari never runs out.

Stupid... brainless... irrational... crappy... self-destructive...

2011-10-29T22:22:00.000+05:30

I had given up on it completely.

Thrown in the towel.

Said goodbye to the concept itself.

Refused to adhere to the "quick fixes" prescribed by my peers : refused to drown myself in either the bottle or the work or in other distractions.

Moved on. Decided to make myself useful to others for a change. Decided that I will look at the world in ways others don't, that I will say yes where others say no, that I will see and realize solutions where others only see and create problems.

And I'd gone on to do great things - learned techniques in communication and deployed them to get the right things done, participated in movements, undertook undertakings which none of my peers would have thought doable, organized, mobilized - a lot of things. Made some awesome friendships. Had a whale of a time.

I had traveled with my mind across the length and breadth of human knowledge - I read, saw, analyzed, understood, went into the depth of things, made amazing insights and dazzled all with my newfound wisdom.

So why, why now, when there is a world full of things I Have to do and which I Can do - why is it surging back like a phoenix?

Why is it tossing me between extreme moods? Why am I crying uncontrollably?

Why is it preventing me from tapping the full extent of my abilities? Heck, why is it preventing me from even functioning normally?

Why do I suddenly feel the loneliness of an eternity? Even when everything is there why do I feel like nothing, and no one, is around?

Why am I hoping where there should be no hope; Why am I ignoring all that I can be doing instead? Why am I waiting endlessly for that which my rational mind knows doesn't stand a chance of happening? And in the process why am I ruining other thngs I can easily make happen?

Why am I choosing the melancholy music over rock? Why do I suddenly prefer the slow piano version over the orginal? Why have I lost my appetite for comedies and action and all entertainment in general?

Why am I suddenly a child again, why am I coming to silly conclusions? Why am I making up wild theories? Why am I actually considering going forward with my deliberations, knowing full well the consequences?

Why am I focussing only on the glorious possibilities and unlimited happiness in store "if everything clicks" without weighing in the risks and the pitfalls, without looking at practical factors? Without stopping to consider that there are people in this world other than myself with hearts and minds of their own?

Why am I ignoring the million other things I can be doing right now? Why am I not getting in touch with the scores of other people I should be catching up with, given only a limited time of rest remaining before the hectic routine starts again? Why am I not at all interested in talking with anybody, yet feeling inconsolably lonely at the same time?

Why am I mentally rehearsing awesome, elegant things to say and then ending up making an incoherent idiot of myself?

Why can't I explain this to myself, let alone anyone else?

Why has it taken such a hold on me? I didn't want this. I didn't ask for it. I admit I got distracted, but that's completely human! Why am I suddenly so afraid of being judged without a chance to be heard out? Why does the prospect terrify me?

Why the bloody hell am I writing a sentimental, introverted blog post in a place where I usually (and very proudly!) stick to practical, big-picture, analytical, fact-based works?

Stupid... brainless... irrational... crappy... self-destructive... heart!!

www.corruptionfree.in - report any incidence of corruption by SMS, twitter or email

2011-10-25T11:38:00.001+05:30

Cross-posting from TOI article:

City student launches anti-corruption site

PUNE: Aditya Palnitkar, a std 10 student of the Abhinav Vidyalay, has launched a website to fight corruption, and has dedicated it to anti-graft crusader Anna Hazare. The site, www.corruptionfree.in, ... will make it possible for students and citizens to report cases of bribery, cheating, overcharging, forcible donations, extortion, scams and harassment in government offices by simply using their mobile phones.
Reports will be made available to media and enforcement authorities. The website (http://corruptionfree.in) is unique in the sense that citizens can report corruption via SMS, email or Twitter without even visiting the website," said 14-year-old Aditya.
Citizens can simply use their mobile phone to send a detailed report via SMS to 8446324670 or by email to email@corruptionfree.in.

Awesome low-cost, high-tech initiative.. hats off to this whiz kid!

There are already some serious reportings collecting : check it out:
http://pune.corruptionfree.in/

I urge all citizens to come forward to offer to help him take this site forward - the main issues I forsee will be corrupt people spamming the site in an effort to discredit it, so just like in Wikipedia's case, we need a citizens' army to fight back the spam as soon as it's posted. This is very easy to do : use the Comments facility to flag any spam posts.

Subscribe by RSS (not to be confused with the political RSS, this is just a feed of alerts) with this link for Pune: http://pune.corruptionfree.in/feeds/posts/default - add it as a live bookmark or to google reader or something so you can keep track of latest posts.

Meanwhile we can also reach out to RTI and anti-corruption experts to come and comment on the individual posts to give more info to the concerned individuals on how they can have their issues redressed or what specific action is to be taken against the corrupt officers.

I usually don't go nationalistic, but in this case I'll make an exception.. feeling proud to see someone "doing something about it" that too in such an ingenius manner! Jai Hind!

How did the financai world forget this most basic design feature?

2011-10-25T09:49:00.000+05:30

I don't understand one thing:

In all the adventure or sci-fi movies featuring some big ship or large machinery, and in all the fiction books writing about such things, everywhere you see a fundamental precaution inherent in the system : compartmentalization.

In the spaceship, if there's a sudden puncture in the hull in one section and all the air is getting sucked out, all the surrounding sections seal this one off - we can surely remember seeing the emergency doors automatically closing in and the film's protagonists just escaping from under in sp many movies, cartoons and serials by now. Same thing happens in submarines. In huge machinery too if there's an accident in one part then there are systems in place to isolate the fault. Even as an electrical engineering student I witnessed these protections being almost ubiquitous in every single diagram from the smallest motors to the most extensive extremely-high-voltage (EHV - yes, that's a real term used in electrical engineering!) distribution networks. Even in tales of centuries-old sea voyages with sailing ships and pirates and all, the punch-drunk ship doctor knows that to stop an infection in a wounded leg from spreading or to prevent the wound from sucking out all the blood in the sailor's body, the leg has to be amputated.

click on the image to see the article where this was published.

So how is it that now when I see all these financial experts and leaders : (who're supposed to the brightest minds in the world to have gotten through to all those ivy league colleges and to have led such huge companies and governments and made so much money) - when I see them talk or see reports of what they're saying about the Eurozone crisis, and the US debt, and the world finanical collapse and everything related - NOBODY makes any reference whatsoever to any compartmentalization-like protection in the super-duper-ultra-complex systems they claim authority over? Instead they go on and on about the exact opposite : portraying this whole thing as dominoes, with just one faulty piece being sufficient to destroy the entire setup.

That ubiquitous, logical, common sense protection - that when one section goes wobbly it should be isolated and not allowed to affect everything else - is just missing! Even the Titanic had it, for God's sake - it wasn't perfect coz the water was allowed to go over from the top - but heck at least it delayed the disaster long enough to let us make a romantic movie out of it :P
And these people aren't even missing it - they're not even complaining about its absence - it's as if they've spent their entire lives without ever being exposed to anything like it. You'd have to seriously avoid all sci-fi and adventure stories and even common sense to be able to do that!

They simply don't know and now they're running scared that a Greek meltdown will drag the rest of the EU down under without even bothering to consider that if they simply just froze all transactions between Greece and other nations, de-linked the country as far as finance is concerened and isolated the bad sectors then it would stop the whole system from going down under. Sure, it would hurt as much as having a leg amputated, but it wouldn't hurt as much as dying, right?

In any case, looking at the emerging revolution that's going to hit in Greece any time now, that's probably what's going to happen whether all these so-called experts like it or not, and we might just live to see a wounded leg hop away from a dying body so it can survive on its own. The Greek people haven't lost any huge amount of real resources or brainpower - and their connection with the rest of the world through internet and people-to-people travel will stay alive even if it's financially separated. They ought to just refuse to be part of an unfair system where the US having done several times more over-spending than them gets to raise its debt ceiling to stave off disaster while they have no such options. They ought to just stop everything and walk away. Like Iceland did.

If we've allowed these pretentious intellectuals to build a system that no engineer would ever dream of applying to a real construction because it doesn't have any compartmentalization, then is it wrong to expect it to fail miserably? Heck, is it wrong to WANT it all to collapse? The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Let's bring it on, we'll be able to make something much, much better of our lives once this mass delusion is gone.

All the Gold in the world...

2011-10-25T07:44:00.000+05:30

..Will not help you put Humpty Dumpty together again, my friend!

I am certain that they will not publish the comment I just posted there - so am posting it here ;) Maybe I can't compete with the Wall Street Journal's readership but what the heck!

A very very stupid article published on : http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/07/14/indias-600-billion-hidden-treasure

My comment on it:

bullshit article. Shows the brainlessness of people who still believe in infinite growth on a finite planet and who love putting price tags on everything without thinking.

1) there isn't enough oil in the world to fulfill all of India's demand even if it had all the money in the world. It's a finite planet and we're not going to get any more, period. China has the most reserve capital in the world and even she will never get all the oil she wants - it's just not there.

2) selling off that much gold into the world market will crash the price of gold and make it worthless. Even using it to pay off any country's debts will result in the same. the price of gold is only high because of the fact that it's rare, nothing else. On the other hand we'd benefit all chemistry labs, electronics, medicine and aerospace industries greatly by making a very useful element cheap enough. (remember Rutherford's gold foil experiment?)

3) You cannot "buy" any country by matching your money with its GDP - that's as absurd as buying a bottle of water in a store by furnishing another bottle of water as proof that you have that much water. If you went to exchange the two, both sides would end up with the exact same thing and there'd be no outcome of the transaction. Besides, if the opposite bottle's an unmovable asset, you'd only be able to really "buy" it by throwing out the owner We'd have to create another continent in the ocean to put the Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans in if we wanted to "buy" them out.

4) Even if we paid off the debt of Greece and Spain and all, the financial systems as they are right now will generate MORE debt in no time, esp with all the fresh capital we made available. That's exactly what happened over 2009-10 and it was the massive govt bailouts that have created the huge debt scenario today that cannot be resolved any longer by throwing money or gold at it.

Indian housewives can only solve the world's problems in their TV serials, so let's just leave them to it, eh?

Ebook : From Dictatorship to Democracy

2011-10-24T08:42:00.001+05:30

An ebook that has been followed by activists worldwide to bring down dictatorships non-violently. This is the result of an unbroken chain in the development of non-violence as a SCIENCE and a STRATEGY rather than just moral posturing.

Gandhi ignited it. Albert Einstein caught it and spent the last years of his life propagating it. Gene Sharp took it from Einstein, set up the "Albert Einstein Institution" (http://aeinstein.org) in his home and spent his lifetime converting the ideas into real, actionable strategies. He scripted a generic handbook listing 198 methods on non-violent action that can be used by activists anywhere on the planet to bring down dictators, tyrants and oppressors. And distributed it for free.

And it has. Whether the book itself was directly used or not, the simple ideas inside it (non necessarily originating from there - most are just common sense when you put your head to it) have done something so powerful, so unstoppable, that it's brought about non-violent revolutions or severely scared tyrants all over the globe - Serbia, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Tibet, Myanmar... They're even powering the recent worldwide protests sparked by "Occupy Wall Street".

It's even led to the production of a documentary film "How to Start a Revolution": here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk1XbyFv51k

So take it and spread it.
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html

Pradigm Shift

2011-10-24T07:33:00.003+05:30

Image by Adbusters

Needed. Badly. This much everyone can understand.

A Thousand and One TV Nights

2011-10-23T18:33:00.001+05:30

Re-discovered : The origins of today's TV soap serials.

I think I've just located where this cancerous curse on today's women and men has originated.
Looking through publishers notes on a children's storybook of Sinbad the sailor, I re-stumbled across the 1001 Arabian Nights. Here is the premise:

About the Thousand and One Nights
The premise for the stories is that a cruel Sultan has threatened to kill his newly-married wife, Scheherazade.
To save herself, that evening she starts telling a wonderful story. She doesn’t finish it, but keeps the Sultan in suspense and he postpones her execution in order to find out what happens next.

As soon as she finishes one story, she quickly begins another before her husband can act on his threat. Finally, one thousand and one nights and hundreds of stories later, the Sultan decides to let his wife go free.

So, imagine that you're the cruel Sultan. And your newly-wed wife isn't a real woman, but your TV. Heck, not even your TV - just one TV channel. The smart ones can get the analogy right now and move on to another post. But still let's explain things, and after that of course there is the big-picture perspective to check out....

To stay "alive" during your evening and night waking hours, the only thing our modern-day Scheherazade can do is to tell you a story but not complete it; to dream up unexpected and dramatc events to keep you hooked so you make it a point to get back to her the next night. That aspect of human psychology - the tendency to get trapped inside a figment of somebody else's imagination - hasn't changed in all these centuries. And once one sordid saga gets over, they immediately start another one before you can even switch channels. This tactic has now gone inter-seriallar... I now see on channels like Star TV (oh, such a far cry from Star Trek, I hope no historian in the future ever confuses the two) one serial ending with a resounding slap or whatever and immediately at the next frame the next show's recap starting. No ads also (alas, but they do come along eventually) They just play the credits of the last one along the bottom, like the people who did all the real work are the least important. They don't even play the starting song until a few minutes into the show - defeats the whole purpose, eh? - at least that used to be something you could enjoy and refresh your mind with - now you're literally being hurtled from one soap to the other.

In this context they should stop calling these serials as "soaps" - soaps are supposed to be slippery. Maybe "sponge" or "fevicol" or "velcrow" would be more apt terms.

While Scheherazade did this to keep herself alive, the TV channels today are doing it all for the purpose of keeping fickle people hooked. The ignored casualty in all this, as always, is the big picture. We have here a nation full of children as well as adults who haven't benefited from education or haven't been able to complete their education because they're busy earning their meals in the daytime.

At the same time we have a nation full of women and men who had the spare time and the mental capacity after the regular day's routine to impart valuable skills to others. Or, they could have done ANYTHING that would have greatly contributed to society as well as honed them as human beings, as intellectuals, as citizens - volunteering their time for any cause. Or even earned additional income for the household in the process. The concept of evening or night schools was started to address this - it was an excellent idea, an all-brainer and the only thing that could have dampened this awesome idea would be the lack of (wo)manpower.

But instead of utilizing this enormous resource of time and brains, both potential learners and potential educators are today trapped inside the figments of other people's imaginations day after day. Even low-income households have TV and they use it all the way into the night - such is the gripping power of the soaps. The TV channel's private gain is humanity's public loss and the consequences of that are evident all around the world today. I respect people's individual choices, but we have only 24 hours in a day and so much still to do before our civilization can truly be called civilized - it's unfortunate.

Addendum: this also applies to all my savvy friends who buzz between downloaded or streaming episodes of their fav Western shows all the time : You're just as trapped in somebody else's imagination as your moms and aunties are! Scheherazade rules you all!

Opinion: Paid Digital TV has caused terrorism and the deaths of thousands

2011-10-06T14:47:00.000+05:30

I want to get this idea out of my head and get back to mountains of pending work. Maybe I'll come back to this at a later date and refine it further.

Main point : Corporate greed in the television industry has created the present-day world problems of terrorism and religious extremism in the middle east and south asia. All the repeating terror attacks in both India and Pakistan, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan as well, Sri Lanka's ethnic conflicts, the Naxalite or Maoist violence in the interiors of India, Iraq's bloodbath of Sunnis Vs Shias as well as continued dominance of hardliners in Iran have been caused by a greedy business model that abused modern technology to line the pockets of a few individuals.

Sounds a little controversial? Let me rephrase it in a smaller line:

Paid Digital TV has caused all the religious/ethnic conflicts and terrorist strikes in our part of the world.

There, that should set some heads rolling. Now, I'll explain how:

disclaimer : I'm not saying that TV has caused all these problems - na, it's the opposite. I'm saying the that the conversion to paid digital of nearly all our channels has caused it.

I grew up as a son of an Indian expatriate engineer living in Saudi Arabia. It was a great childhood. TV was a huge part of all our lives. Back home in India, cable television too had mushroomed. In India, there were local cable networks bringing it home so you'd just stick an RF cable into your TV and have different channels tuned in. But in Saudi Arabia these networks weren't there. So, residents of a building or two would team up, buy and put up their own dish antenna's in the terraces of their buildings. In my building we had two dishes - a big one pointing in one direction and a smaller one pointing in the other. The cables coming out of there were simply joined together, and then split and dropped down the side of the building to all the residents' homes, and they went in via holes made in the air conditioner frames.

In our halls (why do we call it a living room, I lived in all the rooms) we had set-top boxes that took in these thick fat cables and tuned all the channels on different frequencies using several parameters - not just the one-dimensional LF/HF/UHF line of the TV. I remember there being different ways of tuning in audio and video. All the technicalities came right down to the end user and nothing was pre-programmed.

Although we thought nothing of it at the time, the hallmark here was practical simplicity : One dish antenna points at that particular satellite, and the wires coming out from that go down to our homes. No electricity used here. To add a new resident who'd recently moved in, we just put in a splitter or simply wound his wire round the existing ones. To get the channels right, we would simply dedicate an evening to taking the TV and the tuner up to the terrace, hooking it up there and physically moving the dish in all directions possible while looking at the screen to find the right orientation by trial and error. Many channels would come grainy but we did the best we could and lived with that.

I didn't even understand the concept at the time : all satellite TV channels we got were essentially free-to-air, analogue, non-encrypted. So, anybody anywhere in the world, could locally assemble a dish antenna, hook up wires coming out of it to universally available set-top boxes and watch all the satellite channels that we were watching. No patents, no brands. At the time it was understood that the channels cannot possibly take any money from the people watching, so to make ends meet and keep the cameras rolling they used advertisements. Nobody liked them very much, but we all understood they were a necessity to keep watching our favorite shows. It was a bit like putting up with a spouse's nagging so as to avail of the .. ahem.. later on.

At that time, we knew from our family friends living in American compounds (read: high-security gated communities in and around Riyadh made for foreigners where the usual strict rules of burkhas etc are relaxed and they're made to resemble a home away from home for the expatriates coming from western countries) that THEY were watching TV channels directly from USA/UK that weren't available to us. It was on a "Sky network" and apparently only paid or authorised people could get those channels and we couldn't even if we pointed our dishes in that satellite's direction and even if we tried those new digital set-top boxes out on the market. Apparently the american compounds paid for a connection. But still, all the residents there did not have a satellite dish above their homes. I later found out that this was basically the same rig used by cable operators in India to bring us all those channels that we did not get from our homegrown setups in Saudi. But even they didn't get ALL the channels due to government bans on some that regularly aired movies or shows having nudity. Still, there was a huge bunch of TV channels that anybody in this part of the world could watch with very little capital and only electric bills as the monthly expenditure. Essentially, TV was free.

What effect did that have, you may ask? Well, picture this : A small town in Afghanistan using generators could watch all the TV shows - Indian, American, European, Pakistani, Chinese, Japanese - everything - that everybody else was watching. Quite literally, the world's civilization was being beamed, for free, into the regions of the world where telephones, radio, internet, transport, frozen foods, malls, cars had no possibility of reaching. Eveybody loved Raymond. The Simpsons challenged everyone to understand english faster so they could get all the jokes. Everyone enjoyed Bollywood movies and songs even if their nearest theater would never show them. For all the authoritarian governments that banned cable TV on moral/cultural grounds, there was really no way of carrying out that ban : the day after a police raid the satellite dish would be up again - government orders melted away in the face of the iron will of the millions of women across the region who needed their weekly dose of serials. Kids across borders were united by Tom and Jerry and Captain Planet. MTV and Channel V and shows for teens like Friends challenged cultural notions on a daily basis in a fun, engaging and non-violent manner. Even the strictest of adults would secretly watch Baywatch after a day full of moaning the ills of western openness. The advertisements informed everyone about the latest state of technology so even if their local markets didn't have the products, they knew they're out there.

In the face of this continuous, non-stop barrage of the entire world's updated ideas, culture and technology, no hardliner stood any real chance of dominating the hearts and minds of anybody other than those closeted inside their own homes. How could anyone who's watched Phoebe of friends ever hate the liberalization of women? How could anyone who loves Tom and Jerry or Popeye ever even think of attacking the people of the country whence they came? How could anyone who's watching Star Trek be expected to blow up innocent people just because they're from another religion? How could anyone regularly watching Discovery shows on space exploration ever be expected to get really mired into regional conflicts?

Circa 2000 : Something happened. One by one all the channels started announcing they're switching to Digital with oh-so-improved viewer experience and that we should contact our cable operators to know how we can continue watching them. Now in a structured cable TV market, this was of little significance to the viewer. But in Saudi Arabia, and I'm sure, all over the non-cable-networked world, people went "what??" Because we WERE our own cable operators and we had no idea what these channels were talking about! Some channels like BBC who had never had any intentions of going paid, started giving detailed instructions on how to tune a standard digital set-top box. But the other channels didn't provide any details. One by one the channels go off air and are replaced by static screens telling that they've gone digital and giving phone numbers of their offices in places that most of the unorganized world could never reach.

And then some service called Pehla pops up in the middle east, catering to the desperate needs of the panicked expatriates from the subcontinent. Not only would we get all those channels back, but now we would also be able to see several more western channels, that too with schedules and info boxes right on screen, no need to consult the daily newspapers! The only catch : for the first time we now had to PAY a monthly or yearly subscription fee. For TV. Now it sounds perfectly fine to you, but back then it was like charging a monthly fee for breathing air. Something so ubiquitous that we never thought we'd have to pay for, whose running costs were nicely self-financed with all those advertisements, is now going to cost us monthly. In return we were promised "no ads" or reduced ads and very very high quality content. Of course, it was a useless sales pitch : with free-to-air TV channels gone, there were little other options.

And there was something even crazier in store : Everyone who took this subscription, had to get Pehla's own set-top box (and junk the ones we had), and.. wait for it... A SATELLITE DISH. With every single connection. To make it easier, they made it zero installation charges and then zero cost for the dish completely. Now forget about the money aspect, just ask yourself this : There is ONE satellite of Pehla's out there in space that we need to receive the signals from. On the same building's terrace, keeping ONE satellite dish for all the subscribers would suffice - just as before, we can take the cord out and put it in splitters and wind them round and round and send them to all the building's residents, and even to the adjoining building if feasible. But NO, now every family that needed a connection, had to prop up their own satellite dish. So now a building housing 10 families would have 10 dishes on its terrace, with more for the families using more than one connection. The ensuing loss of space on the entire world's terraces where kids would normally go play or where mothers would grow plants or host parties - will go down in history as the biggest unaccounted-for forced real estate loss of all time. Forget the zero-installation charges, if we'd charged those bastards a monthly rent for occupying the building's terrace on a per sq. foot basis and added up charges for all residents in the buildings (as terraces are common space), it would have been them paying us! This model had absolutely no justification : the agents' reasonings that "if you split the wire you don't get all the signals properly" were bullshit. The only reason for forcing this ridiculous wastage of metals and plastic and installation efforts that I can see, is to drive prices up and hence drive profits up. If it's zero-installation-costs then that means they've passed the costs to your monthly subscription, which means they'll easily make up for those costs and still keep charging you long after making absolute profits.

And talking about profits : what the hell had they promised? reduced advertisements? bullshit! Now the TV channels firstly charge companies to air their ads, and then ON TOP OF THAT they charge millions of people for forcing them to watch those ads alongside their shows. The fact that this industry now makes billions and billions in profits proves that they're over-charging everybody. That too they didn't bring this about by making any real costly changes on their end : they simply re-programmed the signals that the satellite broadcasts, and changed the encoding from analog to digital, and put in encryption codes. So that on the ground, even if people still receive those signals, they don't get to see anything until they pay for the service, in lieu of which the agents puts in a decryption code - at first manually and now by inserting a card. Suddenly it's all high-tech but it's only for profit - the technology has been abused big-time. You heard that right. All the different packages that they offer - did you think the satellite way up there sends different signals to your dish and different signals to your neighbor who's taken the platinum pack? You're both receiving the same set of signals - but you get a different decryption code depending on what you're paying for and so you don't get some channels that your neighbor gets. It's all there, it's all coming to you, but by black-boxing the set-top box and encrypting the signals you get denied what once upon a time used to be as free as air.

But anyways, that is not what has caused the rise in terrorism, irrational as it may be. Now let me go into the main driver:

The real problem lay in the payment model. To be able to collect monthly or yearly subscription charges from families, the company in question needs to set up an expensive network of offices and agents everywhere they hope to reach. This can be done in cities and towns that have infrastructure set up to get daily supply of electricity, transport, frozen foods etc. But what about the places where the "grid" does not reach? And what about the majority of the population for whom paying for monthly TV viewing is beyond their family budget? The more out-of-reach a place, the higher the costs for the cable network, so higher charges, and so lesser people who can subscribe, as typically out-of-reach places are also poorer. Also, you need permissions from local and national administrations to carry out business. Which means a network will find it impossible to charge viewers for subscribing to an "enemy" country's channels. Basically, this model is simply non-doable for the majority of the population spread over all our continents - I'm talking 99.9% or more. But anyways that section, which had been benefiting the most from satellite TV by way of learning and liberalization, did not matter to the broadcasters because they didn't buy the advertised products. Dabur honey advertised in Indian channels wouldn't find customers in rural Pakistan. So they simply left them out. If you lived in a place where the network couldn't charge you a subscription fee, then no more satellite TV for you. Gone. I know this happened to my family - we considered Pehla too expensive and now I get how bewildered my Dad must have felt at the whole model and why he never signed up - it didn't make any sense. They took away a good thing from millions and millions of people from all over our side of the world because they couldn't make more money from us. It would not have cost them anything, but it would not have made them any huge profits so they simply abandoned over 99% of their audience.

What was left behind was a vacuum : TV had been the only real thing coming anywhere close to connecting millions of people with the rest of the world. All over Pakistan, millions of people would watch the same Indian TV shows and share in the steady unshackling of culture and the increasing empowerment of women and children. TV was teaching young people that sexuality wasn't a bad thing and that it is ok to fall in love with someone from another caste or religion. Peoples of both nations saw that the people on the other side were just like them. It sent a message of connectedness to the masses of both countries - you cannot expect the people of a nation that loves your weekly TV serials to really harbor ill will towards your nation's citizens. No matter what our leaders said, the people were not in the conflict mindset. Ditto for dramas in PTV that Indians adored. The authorities previously could do nothing to stop this shared culture. But with one Indian channel after another going digital and paid, now there was no way for them to have any subscription collection network in Pakistan - the authorities would never allow that. In the same way, Indian authorities too did not permit Pakistani and many other countries' TV channels. Now with a controlled system in place, restrictions came where there was previously free sharing of culture. So the sharing of TV and with that cultures across the border, stopped abruptly. Mind, at this time even Internet or even cheap telecommunications hadn't made any inroads into the majority of households of both nations. Suddenly we were cut off and the peoples of any nation could now only watch that which their authorities let them. As for the majority population - they were too poor to afford paid TV anyways - they lost out completely, they even got disconnected from the rest of their own nation.

It was in this vacuum that hardline organizations now found a space to thrive. Without a constant source of information and culture telling them that the "others" have emotions and feelings too, or informing them about how interconnected and united the world is or showing them all sorts of fascinating things from different peoples and places all around the world, it was easy for hardliners to brainwash naive minds into believing that only their way and their ideas were the right path and that everything and everybody else was a threat and had to be eliminated. Even the real experts of their own religion who preached peace, were now no longer seen or heard and were replaced by warmongers and misinformers.

And that, my friend, is where all the world's suicide bombers, terrorists, extremists and conflicters have come from. Can you really expect a muslim teenager to grow up to hate christians or hindus or anyone else if he's grown up watching how everybody has the same emotions and how interconnected our planet is or how amazing and beautiful our world and our universe is? In the nether regions of India too, zero connection with the rest of the country and the world made sure that when the locals were pushed out of their homes by greedy miners and industrialists, they perceived them as representing the entirety of the rest of India - to them modern India only represented greedy, vicious profit-crazy plunderers in bed with abusive, authoritarian police forces. Hence they simply did not have the environment or the encouragement to fight injustice in civilized discourse - how can you expect a tribal to know he can get justice at the courts if he doesn't know of their existence or how to go about the process? And so they took the only technology available to them without monthly subscription fees - weapons. And hence "India's biggest internal security threat" as Chidambaran likes to term it. How much have those channels made in profits, again? Is it more than the amount and the lives and livelihoods lost by us in internal and external conflicts till now? Do those profits justify depriving millions of poor people of the benefits of the world's accumulated ideas, knowledge, education and culture while they're getting state-of-the-art weapons delivered to them by arms manufacturers that our governments cannot stop? Does it justify the bomb blasts and the innocents killed?

So where do we go from here?
I can bet with you that if we were to un-encrpypt all of the world's satellite TV channels and make them free-to-air and viewable with the simplest of technology, we'll find peace quicker than any complicated rounds of negotiations or any wars on terror. If the US had bombed Afghanistan with free-to-air reruns of Friends and Baywatch and Tom and Jerry translated in all its local languages broadcast on all frequencies and parachute-dropped TVs, set-top boxes, satellite dishes and portable generators / batteries into the country instead of dropping bombs, the Taliban would have been converted or kicked out by their own women and children in a year. Phoebe of Friends is humanity's most powerful weapon of mass destruction of old thoughts and attitudes - she has single-handedly transformed the hearts and minds of millions of men and women and would transform billions of hearts and minds if only we unleashed her upon the oppressive and backward regions of the world. We do not need war - all we need is some love and entertainment along with elimination of this stupid encrpytion of TV channels!

the God in us - a tribute to Wangari Maathai

2011-09-28T09:37:00.000+05:30

Wangari Muta Maathai (1940-2011)

"I don't really know why I care so much. I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it. I think that is what I would call the God in me.

All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that is on this planet.

It must be this voice that is telling me to do something, and I am sure it's the same voice that is speaking to everybody on this planet — at least everybody who seems to be concerned about the fate of the world, the fate of this planet."

-Wangari Maathai
Environmentalist and womens' rights activist
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, 2004
Founder, the Green Belt Movement

..And also,

-Nikhil Sheth
Teach for India Fellow, 2011-13

(hey, she's literally spoken my mind! No kidding!!)

Wangari Mathaai proved that we can all make a difference in saving the planet, and that we don't need huge resources at our disposal to lead the way.

Photo and words peacefully adopted from this album on 350.org 's facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150329725607708.361945.12185972707

The Golden Cage

2011-09-28T07:55:00.001+05:30

Here is an interesting email forward, and then below it is my unsolicited opinion!

My Degree Isn't Worth the Debt!
Facing college costs that are rising far faster than incomes, many Americans are relying on massive amounts of debt.
We talked to people overloaded with student loans.

Courtesy: Erik Solecki
Erik Solecki
Student debt: $185,000
Degree: Bachelor's in industrial engineering from Kettering University
Was my college degree worth it? Hell no.
I graduated from one of the top engineering schools in the nation, thinking my starting salary would be between $70,000 and $80,000 a year.
Such a specialized, technical degree is supposed to lead to a great career, so I was willing to take out the debt.
Instead, I was hit with nine months of unemployment after graduating. And now that I finally have a job, I'm making about $15,000 a year less than I had hoped.
Even if I were able to afford the $1,800 payments each month, it will probably take me 30 years to pay off my student loans.
I engineer high-end autos. Ironically, I'll probably never be able to afford one.

Courtesy: Saniquah Robinson
Saniquah Robinson
Student debt: $82,000
Degrees: Master's in Health Science from Chatham University; Bachelor's in psychology from Temple University
After holding my Master's for three years, I'm still fighting to find a Master's level position.
I have been seeking employment in the medical field and after about a hundred interviews, I'm left doing contract work for $19 an hour.
I once believed that part of the American Dream was to earn a college education and this would ensure a great career and financial freedom. Unfortunately I am losing hope.
I'm a mother of three, and my husband and I have been turned down from purchasing a home due to our income-to-debt ratio.
I don't want people to think they shouldn't go to college -- it definitely gives you a great foundation to start your career. But it's very important that when you do, you know exactly what you want to study and you're knowledgeable about debt.

Courtesy: Shane Dixon
Shane Dixon
Student debt: $72,800
Degrees: Master's in public health from University of South Carolina; Bachelor's in biology from Clemson University
In my early years after high school, I wavered between trade school and college, but eventually opted for college and earned a Bachelor's in biology.
I quickly found work, but at an abysmal wage of $7.25 per hour, which did not even allow me to live on my own.
After an exasperating year at that wage, I decided to go back to school and I graduated in 2004 with a Master's in Public Health, thinking I was on the road to recovery.
During that time, I had been married, had a child, gotten divorced, and ended up raising my son on my own. I took a low paying government job in Southern Florida, and because I couldn't even make the minimum payments on my debt, I took forbearance after forbearance.
I have had a good life, but now at age 37, the weariness of carrying this financial burden frustrates me to no end.
My son is nine years old now and will want to attend college when he graduates high school. But what will I tell him? First I have to decide if the college degree is worth the debt. I hope by the time he is making his decision, I will have figured it out.

Courtesy: Michelle Shipley
Michelle Shipley
Student debt: $140,000
Degree: Bachelor's in political science and international development from Tulane University
Like many, I had no idea what money meant when I was 17. My family is not wealthy. I simply didn't have the information or knowledge to know what it would be like now.
I had to pay for college on my own and took out loans for everything - rent, food, books, tuition, etc.
Then, during my sophomore year, I lost everything to Hurricane Katrina. I finished my degree, but continued to take loans to make it possible.
I'm now working at a non-profit and I love it -- but I don't make much. I've been able to put off the payments through forbearance, but I know the $1,400 a month bills are coming soon. Not to mention, I've also racked up about $7,000 in credit card debt.
My debt is a life-swallowing, all-consuming, hole in my life. No college degree is worth that.
__,_._,___

Over there it's Student Debt; for many Indians it is mostly "Parents' Investment". For a very few, it's a scholarship. In either case, it is ultimately some few very well-off people to whom all the hard-earned or hard-raised money goes, with only a fraction coming back into the ecosystem in any beneficial way.

If only 100 or 1000 people did this, it would be still ok, but what about the big picture? We must ask ourselves, "could there be an alternative?" Is the world just a narrow tunnel we must rush into, or an open field where there are many pathways to success and where you can also be happy by not running around too much? Especially in the fast-developing global scenario of nearly all education becoming completely free and open to all and existing materials getting outdated by the time their students graduate, should we keep running after the old bandwagon?

I loved the personal stories shared here in this email forward and their power to drive in the point. (Apologies if the photos of the people didn't come through...) They're not isolated incidents : several people I've grown up with, studied with, gotten acquainted with - extremely nice and talented people, are also living under mountains of debt - either to banks or in a few 'lucky' cases, to their families. Does that explain the abnormally high incidence of talented and well-educated people ultimately not marrying the men or women they had fallen in love with, or not taking up their dream projects but instead fake-smiling their way through compromise and calling it all a part of "growing up" ?!

I can tell you this : They are not happy with the way their life has panned out, sorry. Many still have expectations that it's all turning around and "just a little bit more slogging!" but I foresee frustration lurking around the corners. The vast majority aren't doing the revolutionary, ground-breaking, world-changing or noble work that they'd set out to - somewhere in the race for prosperity and status, those innate aspirations took a backseat. In many cases the heart itself has changed and they're no longer the people I knew that genuinely wanted to help others.

They're working hard, all right - too hard in fact, but what and who are they ultimately working for? Couldn't their immense talents have been better utilized? And the biggest tragedy is that they can't just change tracks now even if they desperately want to : the debt has trapped them in golden cages - trapped them until the time comes when they will no longer be able to return to their dream projects. They are no longer free people.

I'm also attaching a couple of great info-graphics I've found elsewhere that explains the fine lines brilliantly. And don't go for the comfortable ignorances : the picture of student loans in India too isn't getting any better. I highly recommend all youngsters who are gearing up for further studies, and their parents who are planning on bankrolling them with the expectation of magically giving them a better life, to please check this out, switch off the TV for an evening and spend some time thinking over it together.

Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
Pune, India
Teach For India Fellow, 2011-13

click on the images to view in full size:

oh, and these are NOT my own.. attributed to jess.net I think...

Need your help for funding my classroom and under-resourced school @TeachForIndia

2011-09-13T19:23:00.000+05:30

Hi Friends,

Need your help to raise funds for my classroom, to give my students who come from slums and low-income families a fighting chance in the battle against educational inequity. Please spread this link around :

http://www.giveindia.org/iGive-NikhilSheth

You can donate here in a simple online process using your netbanking, debit or credit card. And you'll get the tax exemption from this as well.

If you'd like to know more about the Teach for India fellowship that I'm a part of, please visit http://www.teachforindia.org

If you'd like to know more about my class and my school and the amazing 35 kids who have become my heartbeats, please visit our website I set up recently : http://shantabailadat.wikispaces.com ,
or check out my profile on Facebook! In case we've been out of touch for very long now, then sincere apologies, but after checking out these links you'll know what's keeping me 100% occupied nowadays!

Thanking you,

Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
Teach For India Fellow, 2011-13
http://www.nikhilsheth.tk
http://www.facebook.com/nikjs

Why?

2011-09-06T18:34:00.000+05:30

Hi All! It's been LOONNNGG since I wrote anything blog-worthy here, but a recent conversation with an acquaintance on FB, and an open-ended question, seems to have made me spit some things out. That too this isn't about some issue that I'm just observing (as most posts are), but something VERY personal : the events that led me to quit the corporate world and make social work my life!

The question was phrased excellently : I'm hiding the name of the person for now and will reveal it when he gives permission. My answer was a direct thoughts-to-text conversion so it may be a little crazy and I don't really want to "copy-edit" it right now.

Question:

Hi Nikhil!

Upon going through some of your recent updates on Fb, an intriguing question popped up in my mind. (It may sound a bit personal, so please feel free to respond as you wish.)

The question simply is: why?

I admire your altruism especially seeing as how it is so rare today. But what makes you tick? Why do you do the volunteering or the social work that you do?

What is it exactly that goes through your mind when you make decisions that we have to face everyday? For instance, the choice of whether to start working, after a (post)graduation with an NGO or an MNC -- the obvious factor being the money involved. Even if, let's say, one can get well paid even in NGOs today, why prefer the trouble of social work and social change rather than sit at home and have some fun? Even at a rather micro level, why help anyone at all except when helping them is going to increase your own chances of success?

Let me tell you why I'm asking this question. This is a question that bothers me daily. For some reason it turns out that compared to helping others and being all enthusiastic about social amelioration, focussing on one's own issues and solving them as fast as possible is so much more enjoyable, easy and comfortable. In you I already see the social activist, all focussed on positive social impact -- not just the wishy-washy campaign sort of thing but genuine change that is based on ideas that are intellectually and morally very very satisfying.

I would really love to know these answers from you.

Thank you for your time.

Answer: (or a confusing excuse for one!)

Hi !
Thanks a lot for your compliments; I don't know if I deserve them because currently as far as TFI is concerned there are others doing a much better job of it than I am.

Your question forced me to really think about this.. I haven't completely found out the answer to your question yet, but in reflecting over it during our intensive training program with TFI, I had found a few things here and there that may add up to an explanation.

Beginning with : I've always been better at helping other ppl than at helping myself. At a personal level I'm extremely disorganized and always in a mess. Somehow my greatest successes have come when I was doing something not for myself. In the process I did gain a lot so it was always a win-win. But I've never had the kind of ambitions or even interests that I see in guys around me. During by 10th-11th-12th grade years, my Mom was fighting a battle with cancer and the whole family was caring for her. She passed away when I was in 12th. I remember being completely tuned out of all the things my peers were crazy about - cars, bikes, games, clothes, etc. Materialism just didn't make any sense at the time and the MS-in-US bandwagon stopped being attractive.

I didn't become any activist type just then. But I took out a great deal of time to read news and articles and think about things. Was always very connected with anything related to environment and technology and human rights - but only as an observer. It was after college and over a year after joining my company and working in Gurgaon, that I was very depressed over a heart-break, felt like my world had ended and had resigned myself to accepting that I would never have a normal family life and there I found that the only thing that gave me relief from my depression was helping others. (No, I had read way too much scientific stuff in my teenage years and never bought into the drinking/smoking game, plus I hate being one of the crowd) I signed up to join a team of volunteers from my company that was taking part in a Yamuna cleanup drive. I stayed at the camp overnight, shared the tent with some youngsters whom you will find in the most posh mall of Delhi - but on the other side of the counter, as the staff. From conversations with them I found that they all were actually smarter and more deserving of good opportunities than I was. The question of why they didn't get better opportunities - only because of lack of money - haunted me. Even when riddled with so many issues, these youngsters were out here giving their time for a noble cause when all their wealthier counterparts - the facebook generation we're part of - who COULD help easily - weren't around.

That kick-started my volunteering spree that went on for 2 years and I put 50% of my work time in that (and still did enough good quality work to get a big cash award and appreciation from client!). During the time my thirst for knowledge made me watch several documentaries and read new ideas from all around the world and I'd gotten very sensitized to several issues. In 2010, something tragic happened to the person I was closest to in Gurgaon and who had become my sister over the years - she lost her father in a terrible incident and her family was put through severe emotional trauma. I watched as just within a week after the funeral she was back for work - being at a level equal to me (we were recruited and trained in our company together), she was now the sole earning member of her family and supporting a mother and two smaller siblings. This made me question my own situation : no dependencies, no big aspirations, I spend over half my time in doing volunteering or organizing things other than work, was very comfortable financially because of zero excess expenditure lifestyle. The girl who was like my sister was also so invested in doing social work (she'd celebrate her birthday at a home for spastic children) but she did not have any luxury, she had to care for her family. Just like that there may be someone else who needs my job, my seat for real reasons. I remembered something I'd read as a kid somewhere about how in a society it's the "dharma" of those who are well off to help those who are struggling. I got this overpowering feeling that I was occupying someone else's seat - that my role in life is not this and that if I can afford to then I should do something else worthwhile and make the best use of my skills for the common good. I didn't have any other plans but I resigned from my company in June 2010. (without consulting with anybody! it was a personal decision!)

It was a crazy decision of course, but I had made a deal with myself that I'm not going to do anything that isn't approved by the conscience. I swore to give myself max 1 year before worrying about money again. Had enough saved up to sustain myself for 2. I then went even more all-out on the net and read any and every news, opinion article, downloaded and watched nearly every documentary and ted video in existence (related to present-day global issues ie - i hate the dramatized history channel crap, they waste your time and replace the real experts with paid actors). Came across TFI, liked it, volunteered at a school, and then joined TFI. Now I'm sorely missing the freewheeling days! In the long term I want to work in renewable energy and sustainable living, AND technological advancement.

But I hate the monetary paradigm, am convinced it's all a huge ponzi scheme, have seen all the global collapse-related predictions come true (we should all really watch these documentaries that are never screened on TV) and believe the world is in for a major change, and am hopeful it'll be a nice one. So I don't want to be in any rat-race anymore and am still hoping I can shift my lifestyle to a self-sustained moneyless one and protect my family before the shit hits the fan, plus do something to help stave off the disasters of global warming. Meanwhile I'd love to just help as many ppl as possible - it's very important to do positive things around us and so the fellowship. After all, just in case the world really ends in 2012, might as well live doing something good right now!

PS: Why the choice of image?? No reason except it may look good on Facebook! And, just to make you ask, "Why?" ;)

Application for Teach For India 2012 Fellowship is now open

2011-07-09T22:37:00.000+05:30

Dear Potential Applicant,

Greetings from Teach For India! Hope this email finds you well. We are writing to you because you applied for the Teach For India 2011 Fellowship.

We are excited to announce that the application form for the 2012 Fellowship has gone live on our website and it is time to again to come together and work towards eliminating educational inequity in India.

We invite you to consider applying for the Fellowship. We would like to clarify that if your previous application with us was unsuccessful, that will not be taken into account while evaluating your current application for the 2012 Fellowship. Teach For India believes in continuous improvement and will treat applications for what they are now. We believe that you have gained in skills and experience over the last year, and your familiarity with the Teach For India selection process will help you understand our movement better.

A quick update of what has happened in the last few months:

250 new Fellows joined the Teach For India movement in May/June 2011 and recently started teaching in classrooms
Our first cohort of 2009 Fellows graduated this year and are pursuing dynamic paths beyond the Fellowship. To read more about our alumni, please see http://www.teachforindia.org/beyond_fellowship.php
Teach For India Fellows are currently teaching 13,500 students in 130 schools in Mumbai, Pune and Delhi
Teach For India was selected the best NGO to work for by the Economic Times

For 2012, Teach For India is seeking 450 Fellows to teach in 4 cities, namely, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune and Delhi.

We request that you spend some time perusing the following resources to understand our application process this year.
http://www.teachforindia.org/tfi_faq.php
http://www.teachforindia.org/how-to-apply.php

Our first application deadline is 31st July 2011. We look forward to receiving your completed application by then. Kindly visit http://www.teachforindia.org/who-we-are-looking-for.php to get started.

Please feel free to reach out to us at apply@teachforindia.org with any questions you may have.

Good luck!
Teach For India Team
apply@teachforindia.org

TEACH FOR INDIA - One day all children will attain an excellent education

www.teachforindia.org

Call for Volunteers (at a Teach For India classroom)

2011-07-07T00:55:00.002+05:30

Hi awesome Puneite,

If you can spare some time and come over to my classroom and help me conduct the Beginning Of Year assessments, or volunteer a couple of hours of your spare time from home to correct students' answer papers:
1) You will be very lucky to be a part of MY classroom and we can make it OUR classroom
2) You get to see an amazing group of Grade 5 students who'll simply love ya!
3) I get to finish my BOY assessment on time, and we can give the students an education tailored to their needs!

To know more about the organization I'm a part of, please check out our website or this brief presentation.

Q: Skills needed? Does it involve handling multiple kids?? - No, this is all out-of-classroom, is very easy and anybody can do it! (Please talk about this to your mom / dad / retired elder relatives as well as teenage siblings - everyone can help!)

If you feel like you can help in any way, drop me an e-mail or call/text me @966-583-1250 [local charges apply :-) ]
If you have an off day on Saturday, then that's a huge opportunity! Come on over and I promise it'll be the most rewarding Saturday you've had!

I teach in Shantabai Ladkat English Medium School which is located at Nanapeth.
It is next to Sant Kabir Police Chowky on the main road from Shankar Sheth road flyover to Railway Station; also on a direct road from behind Aurora Towers in Camp.
Show on Google Maps

School timings: 7am to 2pm Mon-Fri
11am to 4pm, Sat
Volunteering timings : ANY TIME!

Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
Grade 5 Teacher, Shantabai Ladkat School, Nanapeth, Pune

TEACH FOR INDIA Fellow, 2011-13
http://www.nikhilsheth.tk
http://www.facebook.com/nikjs

I've invested as an online zero-profit lender for an Education loan to someone in West Bengal through RangDe

2011-06-24T15:22:00.001+05:30

Thank you for your Social Investment

Dear Nikhil

Thank you for your social investment. Please find below a summary of your investment:

Social investment amount: Rs. 200
No. of borrowers impacted: 1
Amount donated to Rang De: Rs. 0
Contribute your return on social investment to Rang De: Yes

Payment details:
Rang De credit: Rs.200

Investment Details
Borrower	Investment (Rs.)	Location	Profession
Purnima Barat	200	West Bengal	Education Loan

Thank you for your time and support. Please quote your Rang De email user id for future correspondence.

Regards,
RangDe.Org Team

Teach For India - Best place to work, NGO category - ET and Great places to work survey

2011-06-24T14:51:00.001+05:30

Message we received today from our marketing team:

Dear Best People

I am feeling ecstatic to share that Teach For India has been ranked as No. 1 in NGO category in the Best places to work survey 2011. About 500 companies participated in the survey and we were amongst a few unique start-up initiatives that were shortlisted to participate for the first time. Check out the cover feature here.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/jobs/best-companies-to-work-for-2011-companies-that-came-up-trumps-across-23-sectors/articleshow/8950261.cms

Don't miss to get the Economic Times from the stands today that covers the detailed survey.

I want to take this opportunity to Thank each one of you for making Teach For India a best place to work within 3 years of its inception.

RangDe: Proud to be micro-financing a solar oven assembler!

2011-06-23T23:55:00.000+05:30

Ambika Manikandan 's Evaluation Notes

First Evaluation : Ovens Raise Profits See more evaluations

The loan allowed Ambika to buy the components for her business in larger numbers. She told Ajesh our evaluator that this has helped her to cater to more clients and she is able to sell more of the solar powered ovens that she assembles. Her two year old business has seen a marked improvement and she is able to repay the loan with ease.

Evaluated by Ajesh 1 month ago

Borrower DetailsView borrower profile

Location : Palakkad, Kerala Activity : Solar ovens selling Current Loan Status : Repaying

Ambika is involved in an unusual occupation. She buys oven parts and assembles it into solar powered ovens. They are then sold under the brand name of "Excellent". She works in a team and she needs funds to buy the parts. She operates from home and is a significant contributor to the family income. Her daughter is in class twelve and Ambika would like to see her complete her education.

Fwd: Lokpal bill - how to register your protest on Internet

2011-06-15T16:26:00.000+05:30

Friends

There is a strong back-lash by certain Ministers of the Govt on the inclusion of PM & other senior Ministers in the Lokpal Bill. Actually it is all a hogwash to dilute the bill itself. There is a strong media campaign against the civil society members of the Lokpal bill drafting committee, with character assassination etc . Somehow the looters have always kept the law away from them and taken advantage of the slow judiciary, weakening of cases by CBI. This includes both the bribe givers and the bribe takers.

What therefore is the solution……creating public opinion and giving feedback is a good way of doing so. The Govt of India now has many websites, where you can register your views. There are many NGO's creating on-line petitions…the internet generation can at least spare the time to write to various arms of Govt of India.

They parliament rules in the name of people , but wants civil society out by claiming parliamentary immunity…….....'YOU ARE RULING IN MY NAME BUT I HAVE NO SAY'… I believe this needs a change

Here are 2 online websites

http://pgportal.gov.in/Grievance.aspx

PM of India website. http://www.pmindia.nic.in

At the bottom of the page is 'feedback' bar. You are free to express your views to the PM office directly on the grievance subject.

If you feel strongly on the subject of corruption, please circulate this mail to as many like minded friends as possible.

Wishing India all the best.

Rgds

(forwared by a friend)

Proven : Co-operation is key to evolution, not survival of fittest

2011-06-13T08:52:00.000+05:30

News: It has been scientifically proven that survival of the most co-operative, rather than of the fittest, is the key to evolution.

http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2011/supercooperators-the-mathematics-of-evolution,-altruism-and-human-behaviour

Please check out the link - there's a podcast as well as a video you can watch there which gives all the details. Here's the gist:

RSA Keynote
Everyone is familiar with Darwin's revolutionary idea about the survival of the fittest, and most people agree that it works - but Darwin's famous theory has one major chink. If life is about survival of the fittest, then why would we risk our own life to jump into a river to save a stranger?

Some people argue that issues such as charity, fairness, forgiveness and cooperation are evolutionary loose ends, side issues that are of little consequence. But as Harvard's celebrated evolutionary biologist Professor Martin Nowak explains - cooperation is central to the four-billion-year-old puzzle of life.

Cooperation is fundamental to how molecules in the primordial soup crossed the watershed that separates dead chemistry from biochemistry.

Cooperation is the key to understanding why language evolved, an event that is as significant as the evolution of the first primitive organism.

And it goes without saying that cooperation is the reason that people live in towns, villages and cities. Cooperation can even help to explain the spread of cancer cells and the role of punishment in society.

Join Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield at the RSA as they explore the five basic laws of cooperation - Kin Selection, Direct Reciprocity, Indirect Reciprocity, Network Reciprocity and Group Selection - in order to explain some of the most fundamental mechanics beneath everyday life.

If you can connect the dots together fast enough, this development will blow you away. Everything we had accepted so far, will have to be questioned - the major institutions that rule the world today are suddenly exposed to be completely unnecessary to society.

This mathematically (and by now practically too) proven theory gives credible backing to the argument that existing systems of Capitalism, Game Theory, Communism, Big Government - are all flawed, as they assumed "survival of the fittest" was the most basic evolutionary rule, which inevitably led to selfishness.

Even Communism and now the Big Government systems that run major countries of the world today, assume that people aren't capable of co-operating on their own and so need a big-brother government to keep them from destroying themselves. They fool us into thinking that normal won't take care of the underprivileged, so they tax us and then leech it off for their own ends. Did you know that the Indian government

According to them, the concept of people voluntarily co-oerating with each other, loving and caring for one another, shouldn't exist. If their arguments were to be believed (as they unfortunately have so far), then there is just no explanation for the rise and rise of so many movements all across the world today that want to spread good without any selfish motive other than the practical realization that the only way their children will have a happy life is if everybody's children inherit a better world.

"Economists" (rather waste-onomists!) try to justify, and downplay, the existence of all the benevolent voluntary movements across the world as PR tactics, without even addressing the loophole that if their most basic logic (market economics > selfish motive as prime driver of all human activity) was really true, there would not be any Public around to sell the PR to!

Because of this chasm in logic, this conflict between reality and accepted theories, religious institutions had barged in and claimed that all the good stuff in the world arises from religiosity. There was already enough evidence of organized religious institutions and leaders abusing authority for their own ends in the name of religion, of stifling growth, of dividing people, but because of the claims that everything that is good in this world also comes from them, they were able to justify their existence as necessary and essential to civilization.

The scientific proof of co-operation being inherent in all living organisms exposes those claims and so defeats the monetary, the religious and the government institutions in one blow! If good for all is inherent in us all, if we know that any selfish society will self-destruct by natural inevitability and we have the scientific proof to back it, there is no need for having any competitive system, or any external incentives for good behavior or any big brother to watch over.

Rather, if we probe deep enough, it's evident that bad behavior exists today only because of external incentives that reward it - from genocidal governments to reckless traders to repressive religions to terrorists. To prevent terror, they make more terror, to prevent bankruptcy they create more debt, to prevent vice they end up committing more vice and the vicious cirlce widens. If we got rid of our assumptions and accepted co-operation as our natural state, we won't need the institutions that are causing the mess while fooling us all this time that they were protecting us - we don't need their protection as we don't have any enemies in a world where co-operation is key to evolution!

For the nice religious people, I did not target you; it turns out you were on the right path all along! Using this we can once and for all get rid of the extremist elements in your establishments by exposing their double standards. You won't need to follow made-up stories, rather the most basic principles of empathy, love, caring, are enough as they can be proven by simple logic and don't need elaborate setups like heaven and hell and God and Satan. This co-operation theory represents a path for unification of scientific thought and niceness - we will realize that one is the other and we can have both!

article: Renewable energy can power the world, says landmark IPCC study

2011-06-09T16:53:00.001+05:30

Here's an additional reference source for the pro-renewable energy stand. It gives credible and scientifically backed opposition to the assumption that renewable energy cannot provide for all electricity needs.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/09/ipcc-renewable-energy-power-world

Renewable energy can power the world, says landmark IPCC study

UN's climate change science body says renewables supply, particularly solar power, can meet global demand

A solar power plant in the Mojave desert. Photograph: AP

Renewable energy could account for almost 80% of the world's energy supply within four decades - but only if governments pursue the policies needed to promote green power, according to a landmark report published on Monday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of the world's leading climate scientists convened by the United Nations, said that if the full range of renewable technologies were deployed, the world could keep greenhouse gas concentrations to less than 450 parts per million, the level scientists have predicted will be the limit of safety beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible.

Investing in renewables to the extent needed would cost only about 1% of global GDP annually, said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC.

Renewable energy is already growing fast – of the 300 gigawatts of new electricity generation capacity added globally between 2008 and 2009, about 140GW came from renewable sources, such as wind and solar power, according to the report.

The investment that will be needed to meet the greenhouse gas emissions targets demanded by scientists is likely to amount to about $5trn in the next decade, rising to $7trn from 2021 to 2030.

Ramon Pichs, co-chair of one of the key IPCC working groups, said: "The report shows that it is not the availability of [renewable] resources but the public policies that will either expand or constrain renewable energy development over the coming decades. Developing countries have an important stake in the future – this is where most of the 1.4 billion people without access to electricity live yet also where some of the best conditions exist for renewable energy deployment."

Sven Teske, renewable energy director at Greenpeace International, and a lead author of the report, said: "This is an invitation to governments to initiate a radical overhaul of their policies and place renewable energy centre stage. On the run up to the next major climate conference, COP17 in South Africa in December, the onus is clearly on governments to step up to the mark."

He added: "The IPCC report shows overwhelming scientific evidence that renewable energy can also meet the growing demand of developing countries, where over 2 billion people lack access to basic energy services and can do so at a more cost-competitive and faster rate than conventional energy sources. Governments have to kick start the energy revolution by implementing renewable energy laws across the globe."

The 1,000-page Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN) marks the first time the IPCC has examined low-carbon energy in depth, and the first interim report since the body's comprehensive 2007 review of the science of climate change.

Although the authors are optimistic about the future of renewable energy, they note that many forms of the technology are still more expensive than fossil fuels, and find that the production of renewable energy will have to increase by as much as 20 times in order to avoid dangerous levels of global warming. Renewables will play a greater role than either nuclear or carbon capture and storage by 2050, the scientists predict.

Investing in renewables can also help poor countries to develop, particularly where large numbers of people lack access to an electricity grid.

About 13% of the world's energy came from renewable sources in 2008, a proportion likely to have risen as countries have built up their capacity since then, with China leading the investment surge, particularly in wind energy. But by far the greatest source of renewable energy used globally at present is burning biomass (about 10% of the total global energy supply), which is problematic because it can cause deforestation, leads to deposits of soot that accelerate global warming, and cooking fires cause indoor air pollution that harms health.

There was disappointment for enthusiasts of marine energy, however, as the report found that wave and tidal power were "unlikely to significantly contribute to global energy supply before 2020". Wind power, by contrast, met about 2% of global electricity demand in 2009, and could increase to more than 20% by 2050.

As with all IPCC reports, the summary for policymakers – the synopsis of the report that will be presented to governments and is likely to impact renewable energy policy – had to be agreed line by line and word by word unanimously by all countries. This was done at Monday's meeting in Abu Dhabi. This makes the process lengthy, but means that afterwards no government or scientist represented can say that they disagree with the finished findings, which the IPCC sees as a key strength of its operations.

The launch of the report is streamed on the IPCC web site.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

For discreditors of IPCC / Pachauri who claim that they were profiteering and lying, they can be told about the official apology that the media companies had to make after an audit proved the accusations wrong. This of course was not as widely publicized as the accusations were.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajendra_K._Pachauri#Controversies

On 21 August 2010, the Daily Telegraph issued an apology, saying that it had "not intended to suggest that Dr Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position as head of the IPCC and we accept KPMG found Dr Pachauri had not made "millions of dollars" in recent years." It stated: "We apologise to Dr Pachauri for any embarrassment caused."^[29] The newspaper was reported to have paid legal costs running into six figures.^[28] Pachauri welcomed the Telegraph's apology, saying that he was "glad that they have finally acknowledged the truth", and attributed the false allegations to "another attempt by the climate sceptics to discredit the IPCC. They now want to go after me and hope that it would serve their purpose."^[30]

Join Vinay Pathak and citizens of India and Become a Fool for Forests!

2011-06-09T13:05:00.001+05:30

Dear Nikhil,

Amazing! In just days over 15,000 people have become Fools for Forests. Now it's time for all of us Fools to act because something urgent has come up.

The Group of Ministers formed to look into the forest versus coal issue is meeting for the last time today.^[1] They are going to decide if some of the last remaining forests in Central and Eastern India are going to be destroyed for the coal that lies underneath them.

We need to show the government that there is massive public opposition to any plans to destroy forests. To do this, we need more people to join this movement and become Fools for Forests.

Can you forward the mail below to your friends and family, and ask them to become Fools for Forests?

Thanks a billion!

Preethi Herman
Climate and Energy Campaigner
Greenpeace India

Source:

1. GoM on coal to now meet on June 9, Business standard, June 6, 2011
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/gomcoal-to-now-meetjune-9/137592/on

Dear friend,

Hi! I am Vinay Pathak, and I'm usually trying to make you laugh. Today I'm very serious - serious about saving our forests.

Join me and become a Fool for Forests

I find it hard to imagine that there are people who want to cut down forests for the coal underneath them. Especially when there are other ways to ensure we have power. Sadly enough, our government wants to replace our last remaining forests in central and eastern India with ugly, barren coal mines, displacing millions of people and much wildlife dependent on these forests.

People and organisations like Greenpeace who want them to keep our forests safe, are called foolish. If our 'smart leaders' have their way, they'll clear all our forests. I don't want that to happen because I am a Fool for Forests. Surely you don't want this to happen either?

So watch this video and become a Fool for Forests like me and many others.

http://www.foolsforforests.org/english/join/

As a supporter of Greenpeace, I know that the organisation has been working hard to keep the environment safe and that includes the forests too. This effort to protect the forests will gain more strength if all Fools for Forests like us come together and support it.

Recently, I read that research done by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change has shown that renewable energy can provide for the entire world.^[1] When we have such a clean and viable option, why is the government so crazy about destroying our forests to get dirty coal?

Our children deserve to experience the beauty of forests and the life forms that co-exist in them. Let's be foolish now so that our future generations have a smart future. Become a Fool for Forests now!

http://www.foolsforforests.org/english/join/

Thanks a billion!

Vinay Pathak
Actor
For Greenpeace India

P.S. Want to support our campaigns? We don't take money from any corporation, government or political party! We never have, and we never will. Do help Greenpeace remain fiercely and proudly independent. Click here to chip in.

Source:

1. Renewable energy can power the world, says landmark IPCC study, Guardian, May 9, 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/09/ipcc-renewable-energy-power-world

Spilt Milk (Story on how making mistakes is ok and important)

2011-06-06T15:59:00.001+05:30

Spilt Milk
(got this as an email forwdard)

Have you heard of the story - spilt milk? Well, we all know there is no use crying over spilt milk. But this story is different. I would hope all parents would respond in this manner.

I recently heard a story about a famous research scientist who had made several very important medical breakthroughs. He was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter who asked him why he thought he was able to be so much more creative than the average person. What set him so far apart from others?

He responded that, in his opinion, it all came from an experience with his mother that occurred when he was about two years old. He had been trying to remove a bottle of milk from the refrigerator when he lost his grip on the slippery bottle and it fell, spilling its contents all over the kitchen floor - a veritable sea of milk!

When his mother came into the kitchen, instead of yelling at him, giving him a lecture, or punishing him, she said, "Robert, what a great and wonderful mess you have made! I have rarely seen such a huge puddle of milk. Well, the damage has already been done. Would you like to get down and play in the milk for a few minutes before we clean it up?"

Indeed, he did. After a few minutes, his mother said, "You know, Robert, whenever you make a mess like this, eventually you have to clean it up and restore everything to its proper order. So, how would you like to do that? We could use a sponge, a towel, or a mop. Which do you prefer?" He chose the sponge and together they cleaned up the spilled milk.

His mother then said, "You know, what we have here is a failed experiment in how to effectively carry a big milk bottle with two tiny hands. Let's go out in the back yard and fill the bottle with water and see if you can discover a way to carry it without dropping it." The little boy learned that if he grasped the bottle at the top near the lip with both hands, he could carry it without dropping it. What a wonderful lesson!

This renowned scientist then remarked that it was at that moment that he knew he didn't need to be afraid to make mistakes.

Instead, he learned that mistakes were just opportunities for learning something new, which is, after all, what scientific experiments are all about. Even if the experiment doesn't work, we usually learn something valuable from it.

Wouldn't it be great if all parents would respond the way Robert's mother responded to him?

Every memorable act in the history of the world is a triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it because it gives any challenge or any occupation, no matter how frightening or difficult, a new meaning. Without enthusiasm you are doomed to a life of mediocrity but with it you can accomplish miracles.

Are you connecting the dots?

2011-05-29T13:12:00.001+05:30

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jamie Henn - 350.org
Date: Wed, May 25, 2011 at 8:29 PM
Subject: Are you connecting the dots?

Hi all,

Do you ever feel like there are signs of the climate crisis all around you?

In an article published today in the Washington Post, 350.org founder Bill McKibben connects the dots between recent natural disasters and climate disruption.

Click here to read the article and share it with your friends, family, and co-workers:

www.350.org/connections

Onwards,

Jamie for the 350.org team

Keep Calm and Carry On

By Bill McKibben, orignally published in the Washington Post

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week's shots from Joplin, Missouri, you should not ask yourself: I wonder if this is somehow related to the huge tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that—together they comprised the most active April for tornadoes in our history. But that doesn't mean a thing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advised to try and connect them in your mind with, say, the fires now burning across Texas—fires that have burned more of America by this date than any year in our history. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they've ever been—the drought is worse than the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if it's somehow connected...

Read the Full Article at www.350.org/connections

350.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Our online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries. You can join 350.org on Facebook by becoming a fan of our page at facebook.com/350org and follow us on twitter by visiting twitter.com/350. To join our list (maybe a friend forwarded you this e-mail) visit www.350.org/signup.

What is 350? 350 is the number that leading scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Scientists measure carbon dioxide in "parts per million" (ppm), so 350ppm is the number humanity needs to get below as soon as possible to avoid runaway climate change. To get there, we need a different kind of PPM—a "people powered movement" that is made of people like you in every corner of the planet.

Help spread education without losing any money of your own through RangDe!

2011-05-01T07:07:00.000+05:30

Join in, ppl!

Thank you for your Social Investment

Dear Nikhil

Thank you for your social investment. Please find below a summary of your investment:

Social investment amount: Rs. 500
No. of borrowers impacted: 1
Amount donated to Rang De: Rs. 0
Contribute your return on social investment to Rang De: Yes

Payment details:
Rang De credit: Rs.500

Investment Details
Borrower	Investment (Rs.)	Location	Profession
Madhusree Kayal	500	West Bengal	Education Loan

Thank you for your time and support. Please quote your Rang De email user id for future correspondence.

Regards,
RangDe.Org Team

Fwd: Raja Vikramaditya and Dr. Manmohan Singh

2011-04-28T17:07:00.000+05:30

Raja Vikramaditya and Dr. Manmohan Singh

Once there lived an old and pious man, renowned for his honesty. One day his neighbor, a rich merchant comes to him with a request. The merchant was leaving on a voyage and wants the old man to safeguard his wealth, until his return. The old man agrees and with God as witness promises to protect and safeguard the merchant's wealth.

The old man then entrusts the safe keeping of the merchant's wealth to his son, from whom he takes an oath of propriety and honesty. Slowly the son starts dipping into the merchant's wealth; people notice this and warn the old man of the son's misdeeds. The old man calls his son asks him to explain, he also reminds him of his oath on following the right path. The son rubbishes the accusations as rumours and the idle gossip of jealous people, who could bear to see his prosperity. The old man accepts the son's explanation and things go on as before.

The merchant returns and demands his wealth back. The old man calls his son, who hands over only a fraction of the merchant's original wealth saying that is all there was. The merchant realising that he has been cheated approaches the King. The King listens to the merchant's complaint and summons the old man.

The old man comes to the court with his son and handing him over to the king says "your majesty, the merchant is right. My son has confessed to the crime. Please punish him."

The king has the son flogged and imprisoned. He then praises the old mans honesty and dismisses the case. But the merchant demands punishment for the old man saying, "I have still not received justice.

I had entrusted my wealth to the old man which he swore by God to safeguard. The old man's integrity is intact, but what of me, I have been robbed of my life's savings, and made a pauper. It was the old man's decision to entrust my wealth to the son for safe keeping. As far as I am concerned the old man is the culprit, and should be punished.

The king is astounded by this demand. The old man, was neither a party to the theft nor did he benefit from it. In fact, he had sent his son to jail. Yet, the merchant was asking for the old man's punishment.

The Betal asks Vikramaditya, "What should be the Kings decision?"

Vikramaditya replies, "Though the old man is innocent of the actual theft, he is guilty of dereliction of duty. The son's crime was a straight forward one, the old man's was a graver crime. He did nothing to protect the merchant's wealth. Far from being vigilant he failed to take action even when he was warned of his son's misdeeds. Because of his laxity the merchant is condemned to a life of penury. He should be punished."

"Itna sunkar Betal ped ki daal pe ulta ja baitha"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

India 2010 , Dr. Manmohan Singh, esteemed economist, former Governor of RBI, Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission, former Finance Minister, a man whose personal ethics and integrity are unblemished, takes oath to protect and safeguard the Nation and its assets. He appoints Raja, as his Cabinet Minister for IT & Telecom.

Unlike the story, this heist of a precious national asset is carried out in full view of Dr. Manmohan Singh and his cabinet colleagues. Newspapers across the country cry out at this outrage in front page headlines.

The Indian Constitution grants the Prime Minister absolute power in running the country. He is the head of the Government and the Union Cabinet functions at his pleasure. As per the Transaction of Business Rules the Prime Minister has the unrestricted right to demand and get any file, any record from any Ministry. Dr. Man Mohan Singh could have at any time stopped this heist of a national asset, yet he chose to remain silent. The Prime Minister's failure to exercise his constitutional rights has caused irreparable loss to the Nation.

Dr. Singh did not profit personally from Raja's shenanigans, but his failure to act, to honour the oath of office, to protect and safeguard the nation and its wealth is unforgivable. Like the old man, he has sacked Raja from his ministerial berth, but does his culpability end there.

The people of India had entrusted their faith and the future of the Nation to Dr. Manmohan Singh, believing him to be a man of integrity and honesty, and not to Raja. Does dismissing Raja absolve Dr. Singh or like the old man is he guilty of dereliction of duty and failure to safeguard the Nation and its citizens. Does he not deserve punishment?

--a forwarded mail.

Facebook groups Vs Forced conversions

2011-04-28T06:05:00.000+05:30

A serious bone to pick with FB. Where are the civilized old days when one would respectfully invite you to a group, and you had the option to respectfully refuse? Now you get added by force, things get heaped upon you without your volition, and then when you have to leave, it's made to look disrespectful and offensive.
When I'd said FB is becoming something of a religion, I never meant it should pan out this way! :P

Limited data internet browsing tips

2011-04-20T19:50:00.001+05:30

If you block Flash and images and have an option to turn them on as and when required, then you'll multiply the amount of online browsing you can do for the same MB/GB limit. Because majority of those bytes are always eaten up by the images and flash - basic internet is very low on bytes.

Firefox extensions I used when I had a limited account : Flashblock, and ImgLikeOpera. Now the latter is getting older, here's another one that works and blocks both:
Image and Flash blocker - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-and-flash-blocker/

Flashblock puts a handy play button on top of web video etc so you play it only when you want to.
URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashblock/

It's also a good idea to block ads off completely to minimize wastage of your bandwidth, plus avoid evil cookies and this makes your pages load faster:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

Opera browser has an inbuilt feature to be able to block/unblock images at a click, and is quite fast - on par with Chrome and isn't as heavy as Firefox. The button sits in the lower corner somewhere.

I don't know what's there for google chrome and IE : don't ask!

Cheers
Nikhil

article : The case of Beckett Brennan

2011-04-19T17:08:00.001+05:30

This is a cause women and responsible men should get together and fight for. The phenomenon's creeping into Indian cities as well along with rise in affluence and must be fought right in the face. Girls should be made more aware of their rights and men should know that it is not OK, not to be tolerated no matter what the "cool" crowd says.

This has to be conveyed not through a big brother or threatening approach - because that makes the act even more desired and the defense cannot really be implemented, plus can be misused. Rather, a social disapproval of such behavior needs to be spread - men need to hear from their peers that it's cheap and uncool to play dirty tricks and that it's way cooler to score fair and square. If we can succeed doing that in sports and exams, why not here?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/17/60minutes/main20054339.shtml?tag=strip

Comment posted regarding Wikipedia for Schools... on Jimmy Wales' blog

2011-04-18T19:19:00.001+05:30

Just posted a comment on... JIMMY WALES' BLOG!

Hi Mr.Wales,
I started spreading the Kiwix version of Wikipedia for Schools (2008/09 edition - the only one out there at present) since Jan 2011 when I was looking for something of this sort to put in the net-less computer lab in a school I'm volunteering with. The Kiwix version it's a lot more portable, compact (4GB compressed to 2.8GB and only one file for all the content) and is available for download from http://download.kiwix.org/portable/

I've started a page and a map (for India) where volunteers can co-ordinate on spreading the package (I've christened it WFSOE - wikipedia for schools, offline edition)
http://tinyurl.com/WFSOE (a wikia education pg)
http://tinyurl.com/WFSOEIndiaMap (a google maps link pg)
I'll be joining a 2-yr fellowship programmed shortly where I'll work as a teacher at under-resourced schools in 3 cities in India, as part of a movement to battle educational inequity. The Wikipedia for Schools fills a huge gap and can turn any simple computer into a digital reference library for students, giving them access to information that would be otherwise too expensive for them. I will try to spread this to my cohort of 400+ young people when our training begins in 2 weeks time.

Damn, so many typos and logical errors! I won't be teaching in 3 different cities.. my TFI group will !

Read his post here: http://blog.jimmywales.com/2009/10/24/a-small-wedding-gift/

Quick info on Zeitgeist movement

2011-04-18T18:26:00.001+05:30

The four mythologies till date Economics, Politics, Banking and Religion have taken the world for a ride in all the history. They have created a global systemic crisis bcuz of their rigid & profit-based paradigms that are detrimental to the entire humanity and natural ecosystems.

Make the world free from the slavery of economic, political, banking and religious orthodoxies and embrace Humane, Sustainable, Scientific & Strategic ways to save the planet.

We have answers for the entire humanity. Join The Zeitgeist Movement. http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/ ...

Please support the Venus Project. http://www.thevenusproject.com/

copy-pasting this from another Zeitgeist fan's email signature!

Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
Teach For India Fellow, 2011-13
www.nikhilsheth.tk
Find me on: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google | RangDe | Youtube
Join me on: Pune Documentary Club | Let's Do it Pune | Toastmasters in Pune | Wikipedia For Schools project

Fwd: 400 000 volunteers clean garbage today in Ukraine, Moldova and Lithuania

2011-04-17T04:23:00.001+05:30

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tiina Urm
Date: 2011/4/16
Subject: [Together] 400 000 volunteers clean garbage today in Ukraine, Moldova and Lithuania

PRESS RELEASE
16.04.11

400 000 volunteers clean garbage today in Ukraine, Moldova and Lithuania

More than 400 000 volunteers to participate in massive civic-led cleanup actions this saturday, April 16, taking place in Ukraine, Moldova and Lithuania.

The country-wide cleanups are part of an international civic movement Let's do it! aiming to unite volunteers in many countries to clean up illegally dumped waste. Each of the actions is uniting public, private and third sector organizations and record amount of volunteers in a one day massive cleanup effort, covering the whole territory of the country.

Moldova's cleanup action is titled Hai Moldova! Professionals and students from different fields came together to form a cleanup organization team and start the preparation works in October last year. Today they are looking to bring together the efforts of 100 000 volunteers.

Ukraine had a first pilot cleanup in Kiew last september, attended by over 2000 volunteers. This time the cleanup is targeting illegal waste all over the country and 50 000 ukrainians are expected to show up today. To support the event, titled: "Зробимо Україну чистою!", a flashmob event was organized on the streets of Kiew on March 29th: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsVlNeDBikc

Lithuania is organizing a country-wide cleanup fourth time - the initiative titled "Darom!" has grown from 3000 people event in 2008 to a nation-wide effort, engaging 200 000 volunteers last year and aiming to bring 300 000 people together this time. The task is huge - to clean up 15 000 tons of illegally dumped waste from forests, lake- and riversides.

The Let's do it! cleanup action model was born on 3rd of May 2008 in Estonia, when 50 000 people came out to clean up the whole territory of the country in just 5 hours, collecting together 10 000 tons of waste. After that the initiative started to spread - to Latvia, Lithuania, India, Portugal, Slovenia, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria, where altogether 1,3 million people have participated in civic-led one-day cleanups.

More information:

Let's do it! homepage: www.letsdoitworld.org
Moldova homepage: http://www.hai.md/
Ukraine homepage: http://letsdoit.org.ua/
Lithuanian homepage: http://mesdarom.lt/

Tiina Urm
Communications & PR
Let's do it! World Cleanup 2012
Let's do it! Newsletter March 2011
www.letsdoitworld.org

What we'll have to prove wrong if the Lokpal movement is not to be hijacked by fascists

2011-04-14T18:35:00.000+05:30

Guys, we'll have to prove this prediction wrong if we want to show that the Anna Hazare-led struggle wasn't a Hitler-esque trick where fascists grabbed power in the name of stamping out corruption in Germany back in the 1930s. I'm copying this over from a source on a discussion group:

You may then well wonder whether we will soon see another Anna-type "movement" on the subject of refurbishing the governmental draft of a bill designed to eradicate communal mayhems, or an Anna putsch to seek the adoption of the Womens's Reservation Bill, pending in parliament now for aeons. Or to force the government to draft purposive legislations to eradicate female infanticide, atrocities on dalits and adivasis, or to enforce without nonsense the right to food and education. Or how about ensuring clean drinking water, affordable health-care and sanitation, and securing housing, and freedom from police atrocities to some eighty percent of Indians? Or easy and credible access to systems of justice and grievance redressal? Or justice for a Binayak Sen who rots in a Chattisgarh jail on a charge of sedition, and sentenced without a shred of proof for no less than life. Or indeed a "movement" in support of an Irom Sharmila in Manipur who has now entered the eleventh year of her fast (kept forcibly alive on drips by a terrified state) for the withdrawal of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Not a chance.

It's true that there can be forces out there trying to hijack a movement. But it's also true that the state of technology present today is vastly different than what was present in Germany back then. We must support peer-to-peer and web 2.0 to ensure that no single entity can subvert democracy. Complete transparency wasn't possible back then; it is now and we should push for it as an effective counter to any fascist takeover.

Feedback for Univeral Subtitles Project

2011-04-13T19:40:00.000+05:30

Background : This is an open-source project underway in Mozilla Drumbeat to create a wiki-way of adding subtitles, in any language, to any video. It addresses the long-felt need to crowd-source and make easy the taks of adding subtitles to videos worth sharing with all the people even if they're deaf or can't understand the original language.

I submitted this feedback there; posting it here for my own record as well. Basically brainstorming on ways to take the project forward - it needs some fresh work.

Check out my speech over there: http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/4R7tG8HlBO1C/
Thanks to this I could make several parts of it legible! (The audio was a bit obscure at places)

Feature Request: Please have a mode where I can simply enter the minute:seconds, enter the text, and specify either the duration or the end times, watching the video on the same page. Then in next stage I can simply make minute adjustments. (more ideas shared; expand this article to read all of them)

In stage 2, keep a pin-pointer on the centre of the timeline or the exact point where the subtitle will be submitted if i enter it. (this may be a bit vague).

Also, there should be an option to to record the movie time at which i started typing each entry, remembering that, and automatically inserting it there at stage 2, or a second in advance as I specify. An "auto-insert" feature if we may.

Feature request: How about if we expand the video timeline linearly like it happens in windows movie maker, move the cursor along this timeline instead of moving the timeling over the cursor, let the user click and drag it wherever we want, and just add / move the subtitles here like text caption boxes, again in the way windows movie maker allows us? It seems like a better way to do it. The present way is also good but somehow gives me a lot more tension.

Request : PLEASE make an offline software available for download! Please don't fear that we won't contribute anything online - that will happen too. But we really need to take this offline because the places where we want to translate, are typically places that don't have high-speech internet. The world needs this to be both online as well as offline. Please, this is a sincere request from a developing country where we need this.

Why don't we heed the advice of the smartest man in the world?

2011-04-13T19:33:00.000+05:30

Fact : Einstein may have sent the letter that started the atom bomb project, but he was strictly against its use as anything but a deterrent to Nazis, and he had the vision to see the full long term consequences of using it on civilians, which is why the US Govt never allowed him to be involved in the Manhattan Project.

He did all he could to stop them - his letter begging the US not to use it on Japanese citizens lay unopened on the prez's desk the day Hiroshima was bombed. One message not reached in time brought so much suffering. People who say "Hey, that was the only way to end the war" -- are too unimaginative. There are always more creative ways to achieve a goal. Einstein was advocating that if they really wanted to demonstrate the a-bomb, they should do it over the sea, too far to harm but sufficient enough to scare. Anyways, seeing that ultimately 2 cities were destroyed, that too the second one happened without even giving the Japanese sufficient time to decide, it's obvious the Americans didn't exactly have the greater good in mind. Self-restraint is the mark of a civilized nation, not bullying.

The smartest man on the planet spent the later part of his life continuously opposing the nuclear arms race and making bold and controversial appeals for peace, including ratifying most of Gandhi's philosophies.

In hindsight, what makes you think we should not heed the advice of one the greatest minds to have done so much to make humanity leap-frog its progress?

What makes you think, whenever you say "ok" to anyone who advocates war or conflict or "extreme measures" against any "enemy", that the warmonger is smarter than Einstein?

If he/she is not, what stops you from throwing the warmonger's advice out of the window?

forwarded : A more fact-laden warning on Jan Lokpal

2011-04-13T15:34:00.002+05:30

Forwarded by a friend... this came as a revelation to me as well, and I will have to say I agree on many points. Mainly because it echoes the opinion that a structural change at the roots will be a more effective counter to corruption than some sophisticated fruit-cutter. Which is which? The devil, as they say, lies in the details.

Personally, I favor a bill like Lokpal ONLY if it includes setting up an e-governance model, where the entire public is allowed to discuss and deliberate upon matters. Basically, I want to implement most of the ideas elucidated in the documentary film "Us Now" - which advocates that with the current level of technology, it is now possible to actually have a true democracy instead of the representative model that was only decided upon at the time due to the technical difficulty at the time. Today, it is relatively much, much easier to have everybody participate in the democratic process.

I am also against any form of top-down enforcement including policing. In the last few years I had come to find that police forces anywhere only help to subvert the masses; they're never really there when the common man needs them. So if a certain law increases the net amount of coercion, it's bad. It's better to have a system where there's absolutely no coercion - in the sense that a person cannot be forced to give up his land or be forced to buy drinking water or food because of a neighboring coke/pepsi plant. Because then inherent community harmony kicks in and everyone does what is good for all out of natural process - if the community is free to band together and shut down a polluting factory and they don't need to go beg the government for that, then there will be no polluting factory.

One big thought nagging me all this while during the whole Anna Hazare campaign was this : Any genuine struggle is usually never supported by mainstream entities, like opposition, or the mainstream media. So how come so much show of support, and how come the omission of details in the whole matter? What if they're setting him up, putting him on a pedestal so he's not able to be human and then preparing to bring him down and then de-humanize him? It's happened before. And the point about Irom Shila was good - she's on hunger strike as well since years, why didn't India transit to her cause as well? The AFSPA is illegal and anti-national and anti-democratic and retrograde - we should be fighting that as well. It may be people in other states having to bear it, but let's remember that it's ALL of us who supply the army with the manpower and resources to enforce that draconian law, and they are doing it in our name, hence we are all complicit in the case.

I agree with the doubts about the feedback mechanism : Any system, no matter how sophisticated or how benevolent, is doomed to utter failure if it doesn't have an effective feedback mechanism. In that sense, it would help to have everything about Lokpal completely transparent, accountable and actionable.

I've read earlier protests about the bill undermining democracy, but they were more of apologists to the prevailing order and they were defending the present inefficient form of democracy. So I oppose that opposition. But I support the opinion that a more structural change is needed and that we need a transparent and effective feedback system in place for any law to be effective. Maybe there's a middle path here somewhere - but I know better to depend on luck.

The key points that will differentiate between a good and a draconian institution here, are, in my opinion : Transparency. If we notice even a slightest hint at secrecy, we will have to take it down.

--------------------

At the Risk of Heresy: Why I am not celebrating with Anna Hazare
APRIL 9, 2011, by Shuddhabrata Sengupta
http://kafila.org/2011/04/09/at-the-risk-of-heresy-why-i-am-not-celebrating-with-anna-hazare/
At the risk of heresy, let me express my profound unease at the crescendo
of euphoria surrounding the `Anna Hazare + Jan Lokpal Bill' phenomenon as
it has unfolded on Jantar Mantar in New Delhi and across several hysterical
TV stations over the last few days.
This time around, I have to say that the print media has acted (up to now)
with a degree of restraint that I think is commendable. Partly, this has to
do with the different natures of the two media. If you have to write even
five hundred words about the Jan Lokpal bill, you run out of platitudes
against corruption in the first sentence (and who can speak `for'
corruption anyway?) and after that you have to begin thinking about what
the bill actually says, and the moment you do that, you cannot but help
consider the actual provisions and their implications. On television on the
other hand, you never have to speak for more than a sound-byte, (and the
anchor can just keep repeating himself or herself, because that is the
anchor's job) and the accumulation of pious vox-pop sound bytes `against
corruption' leads to a tsunami of `sentiment' that brooks no dissent.
Between the last NDA government and the current UPA government, we have
probably experienced a continuity of the most intense degree of corruption
that this country has ever witnessed. The outcome of the `Anna Hazare'
phenomenon allows the ruling Congress to appear gracious (by bending to
Anna Hazar's will) and the BJP to appear pious (by cozying up to the Anna
Hazare initiative) and a full spectrum of NGO and `civil society' worthies
to appear, as always, even holier than they already are.
Most importantly, it enables the current ruling elite to have just stage
managed its own triumph, by crafting a `sensitive' response (ably deployed
by Kapil Sibal) to a television media conjured popular upsurge. Meanwhile,
the electronic media, by and large, have played their part by offering us
the masquerade of a `revolution' Ã¢â‚¬â€œ which ends up making the state even more
powerful than it was before this so called `revolution' began. Some people
in the corridors of power must be delighted at the smoothness and economy
with which all this has been achieved. Hosni Mubarak should have taken a
few lessons from the Indian ruling class about how to have your cake and
eat it too on Tahrir Square,
We have been here before. Indira Gandhi's early years were full of radical
and populist posturing, and the mould that Anna Hazare fills is not
necessarily the one that JP occupied (despite the commentary that
repeatedly invokes JP). Perhaps we should be reminded of the man who was
fondly spoken of as `Sarkari Sant' Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Vinoba Bhave. Bhave lent his
considerable moral stature to the defence of the Internal Emergency (which,
of course, dressed itself up in the colour of anti-corruption, anti-black
marketeering rhetoric, to neutralize the anti-corruption thrust of the
disaffection against Indira Gandhi's regime). And while we are thinking
about parallels in other times, let us not forget a parallel in another
time and another place. Let us not forget the example of how Mao's
helmsmanship of the `cultural revolution' skillfully orchestrated popular
discontent against the ruling dispensation to strengthen the same ruling
dispensation in China.
These are early days, but Anna Hazare may finally go down in history as the
man who - perhaps against his own instincts and interests Ã¢â‚¬â€œ (I am not
disputing his moral uprightness here) - sanctified the entire spectrum of
Indian politics by offering it the cosmetic cloak of the provisions of the
draft Jan Lokpal Bill. The current UPA regime, like the NDA regime before
it, has perfected the art of being the designer of its own opposition. The
method is brilliant and imaginative. First, preside over profound
corruption, then, utilize the public discontent against corruption to
create a situation where the ruling dispensation can be seen as the source
of the most sympathetic and sensitive response, while doing nothing,
simultaneously, to challenge the abuse of power at a structural level.
I have studied the draft Jan Lokpal Bill carefully and I find some of its
features are deeply disturbing. I want to take some time to think through
why this appears disturbing to me.
The Jan Lokpal bill Lokpal will become one of the most powerful
institutions of state that India has ever known. It will combine in itself
the powers of making law, implementing the law, and punishing those who
break the law. A Lokpal will be `deemed a police officer' and can `While
investigating any offence under Prevention of Corruption Act 1988, they
shall be competent to investigate any offence under any other law in the
same case.'
The appointment of the Lokpal will be done by a collegiums, consisting of
several different kinds of people Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Bharat Ratna awardees, Nobel Prize
winners of Indian origin, Magsaysay award winners, Senior Judges of Supreme
and High Courts, The Chairperson of the National
Human Rights Commission, The Comptroller and Auditor General of India, The
Chief Election Commissioner, and members of the outgoing Lokpal board and
the Chairpersons of both houses of Parliament. It may be noticed that in
this entire body, only one person, the chairperson of the Lok Sabha, is a
democratically elected person. No other person on this panel is accountable
to the public in any way. As for `Nobel Prize Winners of Indian Origin'
they need not even be Indian citizens.
The removal of the Lokpal from office is also not something amenable to a
democratic process. Complaints will be investigated by a panel of Supreme
Court judges.
This is middle class India's dream of subverting the `messiness' of
democracy come delightfully true. So, now you have to imagine that Lata
Mangeshkar (who is a Bharat Ratna), APJ Abul Kalam (Bharat Ratna,
ex-President and Nuclear Weapons Hawk) V.S. Naipaul (Who is a
Nobel Prize Winner of Indian Origin) and spectrum of the kinds of people
who take their morning walks in Lodhi Garden Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Supreme Court Judges,
Election Commissioners, Comptroller & Auditor Generals, NHRC chiefs and
Rajya Sabha chairmen will basically elect the person who will run what may
well become the most powerful institution in India.
This is a classic case of privileged elite selecting how it will run its
show without any restraint. It sets the precedent for the making of an
unaccountable `council of guardians' something like the institution of the
`Velayat e Faqih' Ã¢â‚¬â€œ a self-selected body of clerics Ã¢â‚¬â€œ in Iran who act as a
super-state body, unrestrained by any democratic norms or procedures. I do
not understand what qualifies Lata Mangeshkar and V.S. Naipaul (whose
deeply reactionary views are well known) to take decisions about the future
of all those who live in India.
The setting up of the institution of the Lokpal (as it is envisioned in
what is held out as the draft Jan Lokpal Bill) needs to be seen, not as the
deepening, but as the profound erosion of democracy.
I respect the sentiment that brings a large number of people out in support
of the Jan Lokpal Bill movement. but I do not think there has been enough
thought given to the implications of the provisions that it seeks to make
into law. In these circumstances, one would have ordinarily expected the
media to have played a responsible role by acting as a platform for debate
and discussion about the issues, so that we can move, as a society, towards
a better and more nuanced law.
Instead, the electronic media have killed the possibility of any
substantive discussion by creating a spectacle. It is absolutely imperative
that this space be reclaimed by those who are genuinely interested in a
serious discussion about what corruption represents in our society and in
our political culture.
Clearly, there is a popular rage, (and not confined to earnest middle class
people alone) about the helplessness that corruption engenders around us.
But we have to ask very carefully whether this bill actually addresses the
structural issues that cause corruption. In setting up a super-state body,
that is almost self selecting and virtually unaccountable, it may in fact
laying the foundations of an even more intense concentration of power. And
as should be clear to all of us by now, nothing fosters corruption as much
as the concentration of unaccountable and unrestrained power.
I am not arguing against the provision of an institution of a Lokpal, or
Ombudsman, (and some of the provisions even in this draft bill Ã¢â‚¬â€œ such as
the provision of protection for whistle-blowers, are indeed commendable)
but if we want to take this institution seriously, within a democratic
political culture, we have to ask whether the methods of initiating and
concluding the term of office of the Lokpal conforms to democratic norms or
not. There are many models of selecting Ombudsmen available across the
world, but I have never come across a situation where a country decides
that Nobel Prize winners and those awarded with state conferred honours can
be entrusted with the task of punishing people. I have also never come
across the merging of the roles of investigator, judge and prosecutor
within one office being hailed as the triumph of democratic values.
Nothing serves power better than the spectacle of resistance. The last few
days have witnessed an unprecedented choreography of the spectacle of a
united action. As I type this, I am watching visuals on Times Now, where a
crescendo of cheesy `inspirational' music strings together a montage of
flag-waving children speaking in hypnotic unison. This kind of unison
scares me. It reminds me of the happy synchronized calisthenics of the kind
that totalitarian regimes love
to use to produce the figure of their subjects. And all fascist regimes
begin by sounding the tocsin of `cleansing' society of corruption and evil.
When four Bombay page three worthies, Rishi Kapoor, Prithwish Nandy, Anupam
Kher, Anil Dharker conduct a shrill inquisition (as they did on the
Newshour on Times Now) against two co-panelists, Meenakshi Reddy and
Hartosh Singh Ba simply because they were not sounding `cheerful and
celebratory' (Anupam Kher even disapproved of their `body posture') I begin
to get really worried. The day we feel self-conscious and inhibited about
expressing even non-verbally, or silently, our disappointment in public
about a public issue, is the day when we know that authoritarian values
have taken a firm hold on public discourse.
Of course, there are other reasons to get worried. All we need now is for
someone, say like Baba Ramdev (one of the worthies behind Anna Hazare's
current campaign) to go on a fast on Jantar Mantar in support of some
draconian and reactionary measure dear to him, backed by thousands of
pious, earnest television supported, pranayamic middle class supporters.
Having said this, letÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s also pause to consider that itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s not as if others
have not been on hunger strikes before Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Irom Sharmila has been force fed
for several years now Ã¢â‚¬â€œ but I do not see her intransigence being translated
into a tele-visually orchestrated campaign against the Armed Forces Special
Powers Act. The impunity that AFSPA breeds is nothing short of a corruption
that eats deep into the culture of democracy, and yet, here, moral courage,
and the refusal to eat, does not seem to work.
The current euphoria needs to be seen for what it is Ã¢â‚¬â€œ a massive move
towards legitimizing a strategy of simple emotional blackmail Ã¢â‚¬â€œ a
(conveniently reversible) method of suicide bombing in slow motion.
There is no use dissenting against a pious worthy on a fast, because any
effort to dissent will be immediately read as a callous indifference to
his/her `sacrifice' by the moral-earnestness brigade.
Nothing can be more dangerous for democracy. Unrestrained debate and a
fealty to accountable processes are the only means by which a democratic
culture can sustain itself. The force of violence, whether it is inflicted
on others, or on the self, or held out as a performance, can only act
coercively. And coercion can never nourish democracy.
Finally, if, as a society, we were serious about combating the political
nexus that sustains corruption Ã¢â‚¬â€œ we would be thinking seriously about
extending the provisions of the Right to Information Act to the areas where
it cannot currently operate Ã¢â‚¬â€œ national security and defence; we would also
think seriously about electoral reform Ã¢â‚¬â€œ about proportional representation,
about smaller constituencies, about strengthening local representative
bodies, about the provision of uniform public funding for candidates and
about the right to recall elected representatives. These are serious
questions.
The tragedy that we are facing today is that the legitimate public outrage
against corruption is being channeled in a profoundly authoritarian
direction that actually succeeds in creating a massive distraction.
In all the noise there has been a lot of talk about cynicism, and anyone
who has expressed the faintest doubt has been branded as a cynic. I do not
see every expression of doubt in this context as cynicism, though some may
be. Instead, I see the fact that those who often cry hoarse about
`democratic values' seem to be turning a blind eye to the authoritarian
strains within this draft `Jan Lokpal Bill' as a clear indication of how
powerful the politics of cynicism actually is.
I hope that eventually, once the din subsides, better sense will prevail,
and we can all begin to think seriously, un-cynically about what can
actually be done to combat the abuse and concentration of power in our
society.

Allow me to pick and choose my revolutions. I am not celebrating at Jantar
Manta tonight. Good night

How India can defeat inflation and rising food prices

2011-04-13T07:04:00.001+05:30

Read this article on Cuba's successful venture with in-city growing of food and how it became self-sufficient despite fuel shortages, trade embargoes, etc:

Peak Oil? Urban Farms? Cuba's Been There, Done It
http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/08/27/CubasDoneIt/

And then watch this video, shot on a terrace in Mumbai, to see how we can convert Indian cities into self-sufficient food producers and DEFEAT inflation and rising prices!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJImcRYB_kU

Want to know more about how transformative self-help and organic living and farming can be? Take a look at the Lapodia Model, where just like Anna Hazare did, Laxman Singh from Lapodia village, Rajasthan gives a brilliant and refreshing talk on how they turned his defunct village into a model village :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3pRQk7bexs

Quoted from the article on top:

The plots were well-tended and bursting with food, there were shady spots to sit in, and none of the workers seemed too hard-pressed to stop what they were doing for a chat. One elderly farmer with a machete noticed how parched I was in the Caribbean sun and sliced me a delicious fresh coconut to drink. If this is the future of city food growing, I thought, bring it on.
"The world needs urban agriculture," Salcines said to put things in perspective.

Of course, it's not like we have much of a choice : http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Poverty_rises_as_food_prices_increase

Video: Why I advocate the Zeitgeist Movement

2011-04-08T18:13:00.001+05:30

This Video shoot happened on day 2 of Z-Day Pune on 20 March 2011.

Thanks to Rishi for uploading this! Please visit the youtube channel : http://www.youtube.com/user/rishigangoly
to see more such testimonials from ordinary people like you and me.

Want to know more about this thing? You can see short clips from the Zeitgiest movie (part 3 - moving forward) on my youtube channel :
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=56B6F90AC2A8868A

And you'll find a lot more in write-ups, content and interactivity on http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.in

And relax - it's not any cult or anything - in fact there's no formal structure at all. The essence of the movement is to move from top-down to bottom-up systems, where order and prosperity emerge naturally rather than us having to fight each other over it.

Want to catch the next event and rub shoulders with more people in the movement to transition to the next stage of mankind? Stay in touch here.

Fwd: Another BIG Win after WC 2011 - Against Corruption - Be a part of this WIN! Read below...

2011-04-08T07:15:00.001+05:30

JOIN US IN USHERING IN GOVERNANCE 2.0, WHOSE HALLMARK WILL BE ABSOLUTE TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABIITY

Dear All,

Today time has come that each one us take up the responsibility of whatever is happening around us.

We are responsible for what we are & what we are not, for what we thin, for what we don't think, for what we do & what we don't do.

Standing by the street, watching the old cry of "What can I do, the system is built this way.... Yeh sab aise hi chalta hai!" doesn't make you feel tired???

How many years are we going to be stuck in this well of concepts?

Had the Indian cricket team not asked this question to themselves, we wouldn't have won the cricket WC 2011. Thanks to them we broke this old concept of 28 years.

Let us ask this question once again...

After so many scams that India has seen, viz Bofors, Land Scams, Sugar Scams, Food scams... only some asked this question.

After the recent Common wealth scam many asked this question. After the Adarsh Scam, now hundreds rose and the icing on the cake for the 2G spectrum scam.

My Guru H.H.Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji, made a statement a few years ago where he said that India will be free of corruption by 2015. On this a young person like me very eagerly asked him a question in a public gathering of millions

"With the current sprouting of scams, where is your vision of a corruption free India by 2015"

Guruji replied "You know when a building collapses as in a controlled demolition, the dust rises to its maximum as the building is about to collapse completely"

"Similarly when negativity is at its Peak, all scams (dust) will be seen the most... Don't be disheartened, but it is an indication that every negativity is about to collapse. So don't discard the self effort"

Now, what have done for these scams to end? Many things like pay a small bribe to the traffic policeman to break the signal, pay that small bribe for getting those railway tickets without standing in long queues... Yes so we helped corruption, in our own way!

What can we do now?

The best you can! Help again !!!

Just support a Mahatma...

A mahatma announces fast unto death
Anna Hazare has given an ultimatum to the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh to enact stringent anti-corruption law – the peoples "Jan Lokpal Bill"! Jail to the corrupt must become a reality! We have been betrayed by those that are leading us!

When & Where?

From 5th April at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi and hundreds of cities in India and Abroad

Who is Anna Hazare?

A soldier, lone survivor in his unit in 1965 Indo-Pak war, Anna dedicated his life to the well-being of society. A bachelor, an ascetic, he has no possessions, no bank balance and lives in a temple. He is a living Mahatma Gandhi!

In Maharashtra, Anna has single handedly transformed barren and dry regions into green and food surplus areas. He has fasted unto death on several earlier occasions. He forced the Maharashtra government to dismiss the corrupt - 6 ministers and 400 officers. Due to his fast, the govt enacted the Maharashtra RTI Act. In 2006, when government of India tried to amend the Central RTI Act, he again went on an indefinite fast and forced the Indian government not to amend RTI Act.

Leaders, organizations and the common man from across India will be with him. This is a do or die moment – let us make it happen!

Across India, join Swami Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravishankar, Swami Agnivesh, Arch Bishop Vincent Concessao, Mahmood A Madani, Kiran Bedi, J M Lyngdoh, Shanti Bhushan, Prashant Bhushan, Arvind Kejriwal, Mufti Shamoom Qasmi, Mallika Sarabhai, Arun Bhatia, Sunita Godara, All India Bank Employees Federation, PAN IIT Alumni Association, Common Cause and many other prominent organizations and leaders, as India comes out on the streets! 100+ CITIES WILL RALLY BEHIND ANNA!

This is a defining moment for India that can give our children a better future! Let us unite and stand by him! Thousands will be there to support him. Will you be there? Confirm your participation here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=197559453604800 or here http://aidindia.org/main/component/option,com_facileforms/Itemid,466/

Anna's appeal to the people:

When I sit on fast from 5 April, I urge my fellow countrymen to

Join me in fasting for one, two, three or whatever number of days you can comfortably fast.
Along with fast, please pray to God (whoever you believe in) for better and corruption free India. Collective prayers from all the people of India would definitely have a huge impact.
Write an impassioned plea to our Prime Minister that we look upon him to pass "Jan Lokpal Bill", else we will be compelled not to vote for his party in next elections.
Remain calm and peaceful and develop the courage to go to jail, if required, in this next freedom movement.

If possible, come and stay with Anna at Jantar Mantar for a few days from April 5th.

Drafted by Justice Santosh Hegde, Prashant Bhushan and Arvind Kejriwal, this Bill has been refined on the basis of feedback received from public on website and after series of public consultations. It has also been vetted by and is supported by Shanti Bhushan, J M Lyngdoh, Kiran Bedi, Anna Hazare etc. It was sent to the PM and all CMs on 1st December. However, there is no response.

Salient features of Jan Lokpal Bill

1. An institution called LOKPAL at the centre and LOKAYUKTA in each state will be set up

2. Like Supreme Court and Election Commission, they will be completely independent of the governments. No minister or bureaucrat will be able to influence their investigations.

3. Cases against corrupt people will not linger on for years anymore: Investigations in any case will have to be completed in one year. Trial should be completed in next one year so that the corrupt politician, officer or judge is sent to jail within two years.

4. The loss that a corrupt person caused to the government will be recovered at the time of conviction.

5. How will it help a common citizen: If any work of any citizen is not done in prescribed time in any government office, Lokpal will impose financial penalty on guilty officers, which will be given as compensation to the complainant.

6. So, you could approach Lokpal if your ration card or passport or voter card is not being made or if police is not registering your case or any other work is not being done in prescribed time. Lokpal will have to get it done in a month's time. You could also report any case of corruption to Lokpal like ration being siphoned off, poor quality roads been constructed or panchayat funds being siphoned off. Lokpal will have to complete its investigations in a year, trial will be over in next one year and the guilty will go to jail within two years.

7. But won't the government appoint corrupt and weak people as Lokpal members? That won't be possible because its members will be selected by judges, citizens and constitutional authorities and not by politicians, through a completely transparent and participatory process.

8. What if some officer in Lokpal becomes corrupt? The entire functioning of Lokpal/ Lokayukta will be completely transparent. Any complaint against any officer of Lokpal shall be investigated and the officer dismissed within two months.

9. What will happen to existing anti-corruption agencies? CVC, departmental vigilance and anti-corruption branch of CBI will be merged into Lokpal. Lokpal will have complete powers and machinery to independently investigate and prosecute any officer, judge or politician.

10. It will be the duty of the Lokpal to provide protection to those who are being victimized for raising their voice against corruption.

How Jan Lokpal Bill will improve existing anti-corruption systems?

Existing System	System Proposed by civil society
No politician or senior officer ever goes to jail despite huge evidence because Anti Corruption Branch (ACB) and CBI directly come under the government. Before starting investigation or initiating prosecution in any case, they have to take permission from the same bosses, against whom the case has to be investigated.	Lokpal at centre and Lokayukta at state level will be independent bodies. ACB and CBI will be merged into these bodies. They will have power to initiate investigations and prosecution against any officer or politician without needing anyone's permission. Investigation should be completed within 1 year and trial to get over in next 1 year. Within two years, the corrupt should go to jail.
No corrupt officer is dismissed from the job because Central Vigilance Commission, which is supposed to dismiss corrupt officers, is only an advisory body. Whenever it advises government to dismiss any senior corrupt officer, its advice is never implemented.	Lokpal and Lokayukta will have complete powers to order dismissal of a corrupt officer. CVC and all departmental vigilance will be merged into Lokpal and state vigilance will be merged into Lokayukta.
No action is taken against corrupt judges because permission is required from the Chief Justice of India to even register an FIR against corrupt judges.	Lokpal & Lokayukta shall have powers to investigate and prosecute any judge without needing anyone's permission.
Nowhere to go - People expose corruption but no action is taken on their complaints.	Lokpal & Lokayukta will have to enquire into and hear every complaint.
There is so much corruption within CBI and vigilance departments. Their functioning is so secret that it encourages corruption within these agencies.	All investigations in Lokpal & Lokayukta shall be transparent. After completion of investigation, all case records shall be open to public. Complaint against any staff of Lokpal & Lokayukta shall be enquired and punishment announced within two months.
Weak and corrupt people are appointed as heads of anti-corruption agencies.	Politicians will have absolutely no say in selections of Chairperson and members of Lokpal & Lokayukta. Selections will take place through a transparent and public participatory process.
Citizens face harassment in government offices. Sometimes they are forced to pay bribes. One can only complaint to senior officers. No action is taken on complaints because senior officers also get their cut.	Lokpal & Lokayukta will get public grievances resolved in time bound manner, impose a penalty of Rs 250 per day of delay to be deducted from the salary of guilty officer and award that amount as compensation to the aggrieved citizen.
Nothing in law to recover ill gotten wealth. A corrupt person can come out of jail and enjoy that money.	Loss caused to the government due to corruption will be recovered from all accused.
Small punishment for corruption- Punishment for corruption is minimum 6 months and maximum 7 years.	Enhanced punishment - The punishment would be minimum 5 years and maximum of life imprisonment.

(This movement is neither affiliated nor aligned to any political party)

Please give 1 miss call on 022-61550789 (call automatically gets cut) to support ANNA HAZARE for his 'FAST' against corruption. if the number comes busy please do not lose hope n keep trying.

Also, we as Ambassadors of the Art Of Living Foundation under the guidance of H.H. Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji have started a sign up campaign to support Anna Hazareji and this country.

Be a part of the solution now, it is never too late.

I am personally taking down the names of people who are interested in signing the petition.

If you support the noble cause and want to be part of this victory just reply to this email with your full name, Mobile Number and Email id.

As I mentioned earlier, we have been helping since time immemorial, but today we help with an intention to do good for the country.

Spread this message...

"This Country has been swinging between Slums and Scams. We have to take responsibility today, that now India sees the Prosperity that it is destined to" - Sri Sri

Thanks & Regards,

In Service of Love :)

Varun Rishi Uniyal | 9823400013

Video: Lapodia Model : not just organic farming; organic living!

2011-04-01T18:49:00.000+05:30

This model can show the way towards the organic farming revolution that can cut out our over-dependence on petroleum-based fertilizers pesticides etc, reduce prices, increase corp yields, eliminate flood risks, and make our country healthy again! Bring it on, Lapodia!

Info: Laxman Singh from Lapodia village giving a brilliant and refreshing talk on how they turned his defunct village into a model village thanks to organic farming and sustainable community development.

Language : Hindi
Video shot during Renaissance 2011, a 3-day social entrepreneurship fest held at BITS Pilani
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_India

Expatriates of India and Pakistan can show us the way to peaceful co-existence

2011-04-01T18:41:00.000+05:30

'India and Pakistan Peace Programme.'
Share your thoughts by commenting.

(a conversation in a group "One thought can change India" on Facebook)

My comment:
P2P - people to people is the only way, even in flame wars we see that they lead to comical acknowledgements of our own sillyness rather than prolonged conflict.

A great place to start is the EXPATRIATE population of both countries living in large numbers in the Gulf and the West.There, Indians and Pakistanis live comfortably with each other and have warm relations, with the kids occasionally playing Indo-Pak matches of their own! So, any government envoy of one country to the other, should ideally be a person who has grown up in such an environment of bonhomie and has childhood friends from the other country. If you have a childhood friend in a place, you are less likely to allow a war to happen there.

An even better option would be cross-border couples, but then you better be careful if they ever get divorced ;)

Forced Taxation Vs Voluntary Contribution

2011-03-28T19:35:00.000+05:30

Silly Question : Among all the people I know who earn well enough to be taxed, how many invest in tax-saving instruments ?

Answer: Nearly all. Even though we all know that doing so, we're essentially avoiding contributing to our respective country's expenditure on welfare. And the richer people are, the more complete I see the incidence of tax-saving.

Knee-jerk Reaction #1: People who earn money are evil traitors >> Stupid answer.
Knee-jerk Reaction #2: Poor people are evil parasites >> Stupider and insidiously more dangerous answer. (implicit approval of systematic genocide, anyone??)

Reasoning : At the present taxation system coupled with economic scenario, at least in countries like India, the average taxpayer ends up losing his/her future financial security if they pay the full taxes. (now don't quote SRK and Tendulkar to me - I'm talking about the AVERAGE taxpayer!). The yearly raising of slabs and provision of sops and subsidies isn't some favor being done by the governments - they have to do that to stave off popular revolt among the income earners.

There is obviously merit in investing in tax-saving instruments that will give you your hard-earned money back after a period of time, possibly with increments, so that when your child grows up, you can set apart the required capital to fund his/her higher education without dooming them to a debt trap, or for that financial emergency where you simply cannot trust your government for instant assistance. Basically, you have to look after yourself and your family first. If this was not so, then every single tax-free investment - be it mutual funds or insurances or anything - would today not have any reason to exist.

Those who say this is a good and logical balance, don't seem to be looking at the extreme end of the ladder. The richest amongst us are the best placed to really help the country, this important role even finds mention in the world's most ancient religious texts. Yet due to this system, they are typically the ones investing the most in tax-saving (esp since gains multiply as you increase the input capital).

Yes, we have our Bill Gates, Buffets and Premjis, but they are a fractional minority compared to the full quantity that has absolutely no plans to loosen their purses. After all, why should they? They became well off in spite of the system - they've had to fight the system for what they've earned, in many cases being forced to sell their souls just in the quest for their family's happiness. Don't expect them to suddenly turn turtle - you wouldn't. Long-term wisdom isn't as prevalent among the rich as we might be tempted to assume. If it was, we wouldn't see the crap going on around in the name of luxury and high-end lifestyle! :P Therefore, the present system, though seemingly in balance, is screwing us all, by endangering the security of the middle levels while having nothing worthwhile from the top levels.

Note : I'll exclude tax-free contributions from this analysis because in that you're just parting with money that is never coming back to you, for the benefit of your expanded group. There is nothing to be thankful about a donation to a legitimate cause being tax-free - that's like getting surprised at getting wet while having a bath. If such donations were taxed, THAT would be illegal and would amount to outright robbery committed by the state (and don't get me started on taxes on private transactions!) plus it would be willful damage to legitimate causes by giving negative incentive to potential helpers.

Response : FORCED contribution is bad. If you force someone to help someone else, she/he will do whatever it takes to avoid it. It holds true at any scale. Give a kid a chance to help another and he'll do it willingly. Force him to do it and what happens? It's sort of related to the modern discoveries on what really motivates people, see this Talk+Animation video by Dan Pink/RSA for insight. Not only that, by applying force, the person clams up and won't even contribute the little that he/she could easily have without risk to self. Now apply this trend to the entire earning population of a nation and what do you get?

Available Data : Several organizations across the globe, devoted to doing service to ordinary people (aka, what governments should be doing), are operating successfully and even setting milestones, running purely off voluntary no-strings-attached donations. In many cases they're leading the pack in their sectors.
Examples : Wikipedia, Democracy Now, Greenpeace, Mozilla

The example of Wikipedia (I'm actually referring to Wikimedia foundation that runs it alongside a host of other things) is a case in point. It is Humanity's largest ever resource of knowledge, available for free to everybody. It's got more welfare packed in it than any government measure till date, and is totally funded by voluntary contributions, at a barebones budget compared to its closest competitors thanks to a global army of volunteers constituting simple people like you and me. The constituents of Humanity do not pay any taxes to have its greatest Knowledge resource, yet random humans from across the globe sustain it. Those who can, help, of their own volition, without being forced to.

Inference : When you give someone the freedom to help you, they do. Everyone doesn't need to, but if the cause is worth it then nature will make it happen - benefiting the common good for the inevitable prosperity of your own children is a trait embedded in evolution, not needing any external influence. then how many people you know pay their full taxes, again?

Proposal : Open challenge to any Government in the world: Stop this stupid taxation system for a year and open a Paypal account / any avenue by which your citizen, or any netizen, can contribute of his/her own accord towards the development of your country / state / city. I'm not talking about a relief fund for use in emergencies - no surprises for that again - I'm talking actual, run-of-the-mill operations.

Stop the fear-mongering that you won't get anything - because judging by all the adverts and data we are seeing about tax-saving investments, YOU ARE NOT GETTING MUCH FROM DIRECT INCOME TAX ANYWAY, it's costing you 80% of your effort to run after this less than 20% of input, and you are en route to losing whatever you are getting, over the coming years.

Learn from the successes of the open model. Open your mind to the possibility of no-strings-attached funds flowing in like magic, and schools, hospitals, roads, shelters, infrastructures coming up at a scale that you couldn't even imagine before, and then more funds coming in to whatever department's doing the best work. Imagine a country where the anonymous rich voluntarily help the poor out of poverty rather than avoiding them like the plague. Let's see what happens!

Possible middle path : Fine, keep your bloody taxes, we're all going to cheat.. sorry, Invest! our way out of them anyways. But open that Paypal / donation account and mainstream it, trumpet the results and you'll start witnessing a natural flow of goodwill along with greater citizen participation and resultant transparency, of course (Ah, now we know why the babus will oppose this if at all... no scope for bribes in an open volutary model! But we have to chase corruption out anyways, so this can't be a valid excuse). And if you don't want to open up, be prepared to have non-profit NGOs literally replace you. The writing is on the wall.

Accelerated Gnowledge

2011-03-26T02:49:00.001+05:30

"If this doesn't blow your mind, then you have no imagination!" - Salman Khan (the global educator, not the actor!)

Exhibit A:
http://www.gnowledge.org/view_concept_activity?objid=6520&level=1&gen=1&maptype=depmap

A Meta diagram (or concept map or call it what you like) illustrating the linkage of the concept of acceleration with other concepts. This basically tells you that in order to understand acceleration, it's advisable to understand the concepts of velocity, speed, and rate of change prior.
And then, if you successfully understand acceleration, then you can move ahead to understanding terminal speed, force, acceleration due to gravity.

Exhibit B:
Now go to the address bar of that page, change level=1 to level=0 and what do you get...
http://www.gnowledge.org/view_concept_activity?objid=6520&level=0&gen=1&maptype=depmap

You'll have to click-through to see the diagram in full - it's huge!
You can now see all the concepts, right from the very basic, that lead to the one in question, as well as all its offshoots!

The beauty of it : It's all computer-generated, made by stitching together hundreds of simple statements like "A depends on B".

Check out the website: http://www.gnowledge.org/, made and maintained by the gnowledge.org lab of Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, Mumbai, (I've had the good fortune of meeting and interacting with Prof GN and his team behind this recently, more on that later!)

Imagine the potential for education : If enough people collaborate to build this up (it's an open collaboration website - everyone can pitch in with little tid-bits to build up the whole), then we can throw all the linear education models out the window and replace them with an organic mesh like this that will help educate in a much better way. This can be used to formulate much better teaching plans.

Looking forward to a lot of cool stuff emerging here!

Inviting you to our school's showcase event : Pratibha, on 17th of March, 5pm onwards!

2011-03-15T20:17:00.002+05:30

Update: What an amazing evening!!

Check out the pics from the event here

Check out pics from the making of Pratibha here

This montage, "School Chale Hum" we made was screened at the event on projector, and everybody loved it!

Check out a video slideshow of the event while humming to "Aashaayein Mile Dil Ki" !

Inviting One and All

To a showcase event for our primary english medium school located in Pune. We are a municipal school and the four Teach For India fellows here (and volunteers!) are putting together an event of the sort that our school has never seen earlier - in a nice auditorium and complete with plays, presentations, exhibitions by the students!

PFA the invitation card!

More than audience, volunteers are needed - at as well as before the event! We've done a whole lot of work already including a full fledged dress rehearsal today, but we still need a few good people to be there for critical tasks at backstage or to smoothen things at the changing rooms or to film the event, etc! Please let me or the given contact persons know if if you can help us out! AND PLEASE INFORM BY PHONE - too little time for email and I'll be at the school from morning 7am tomorrow! Do you know a friend who's into event management? Then please forward to him/her!

For a teaser intro to our school and its lovely kids, please check out a video "school chale hum" I've put on http://www.youtube.com/user/nikjs (it's still uploading, should be done in half an hour)

Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
Teach For India Fellow, 2011-13
www.nikhilsheth.tk
Find me on: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google | RangDe

what a day!

2011-03-10T09:40:00.001+05:30

What a day! back from one trip and on to another.. been awake 21 hrs! Went to Raigad with Digital Bridge foundation & Gnowledge Labs, they finally made Ubuntu distro with the software for wikipedia 4 schools embedded (and having a lot more edu stuff too), got the dvd image for it and will be taking it further, co-wrote with the teachers a marathi write-up for the rural school there, the village's first contrib to wikipedia marathi, and got the whole dump of Khan Academy vids from a friend in Gnowledge labs!

Now I have an awesome cocktail of super duper educational stuff -- mind-blowing software and mind-blowing content combined, yay~!

Quick post.. more details later

Clarification about WFSOE and English and Indan Language Wikipedias

2011-03-01T22:27:00.000+05:30

Comment - a little too long so posting here - to a blog post:
http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/releasing-wikipedia-cd-few-concerns/

First of all, a big thanks for publicizing the Wikipedia For Schools Offline Edition (WFSOE) project. I can't say I started any of it, but I did my best to push it including talking about it, setting up a wiki page for co-ordination among volunteers, contacting the wikipedia community to troubleshoot as I was having problems and directly contacting the developers to try and take the software forward including getting some critical bugs fixed by now.

I would have greatly appreciated it if the author had also posted the link to the main wiki page mentioned in the community email that he is taking inspiration from, as a reference for readers: http://education.wikia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_For_Schools_Offline_Edition or http://tinyurl/WFSOE

As a side thought and for a different audience (my relatives who are not on the net), I'd requested the developers and got made ZIM files of wikipedia in the 3 Indian languages I speak - Hindi, Marathi, Gujrati. (Ref: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3170337&group_id=175508&atid=873518) These, with the English 45000+ articles wikipedia dump, are all stored on my portable HDD which I've used to install WFSOE. Unlike what the more well-off folks like to believe, most computers in schools out there don't have working DVD drives or any optical drives at all, and the WFSOE is 2.8 GBs in size, making any CD impossible. (I never quoted a CD myself - an HT article simplified DVD/USB to CD obviously for its layman readers and this blog post seems to have followed suit despite the facts)

USB drive is the best option, though I'd love to get my hands on one with a read-only switch to avoid all the viruses I've encountered on target PCs so far!

In the email I shared with wikipedia community prior to my talk at GNUnify in Pune, I hence mentioned that I also have these English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujrati dumps in case anybody wants to copy these over, in the spirit of sharing that wikipedians are known for. That email was also marked to several of my contacts in Pune (who really has the the time to write customized emails on the same topic for every group of friends these days, huh??) who I assure you do not happen to be school children at all though at one time they most definitely were as was I, and so the GNUnify event was a common place where we could meet up and swap wikpedia dumps!

How that got intertwined with WFSOE is beyond me. Even the wiki-page I set up that describes WFSOE in detail doesn't have anything of the sort on it. I think any person will know right off the bat that those bigger english and indian-language dumps are definitely not meant for use by school children. Why in the world would an NGO spend several months creating the WFSOE otherwise? Whoever would even think about handing the full versions out to kids (or claim that anyone would start a well publicized open initiative to do something so lewd!) would have to be retarded if not criminally careless. So I have no idea how the author connected those dots and even took it forward (and how!) without bothering to check the facts first.

But there is one inter-mixing regarding not kids but their guardians, that shone a light of optimism so bright it made my day-

Where I demonstrated the WFSOE to school teachers/principal, I also showed them the much bigger english one as a possible fallback for the staff in case an article they want isn't there on WFSOE (at present it's pretty sparse and I eagerly await a newer version, seeing that the ZIM format occupies around 1 GB lesser than the original WFSOE, hence making room for over double the number of articles!), and along with that loaded the Hindi and Marathi wikipedias to show them for real that Wikipedia is present in Indian languages as well - a fact they were never aware of.

So then, the staff naturally kept a copy of whatever I had on a staff-access-only computer, from where they'd take it all to their own homes and neighborhoods and to other schools. These things are released for free distribution and any adult has full right to store a copy. The teachers at the schools are MUCH more concerned about the content going to the students than any of us will ever be so I trust their responsibility more than I can trust any self-proclaimed guardian. Besides, I'm not a pessimist and neither is Wikipedia.

Anyways, upon operating the Marathi wikpedia offline, saying that they were impressed would be an understatement. Unwittingly I'd brought them the world's largest electronic offline collection of easily searchable (that engine's a feat of computer engineering - lightning fast and catches everything!) and instantly accessible (almost no lag time even on slower PCs) Marathi language articles loaded with images, inter-links and great formatting that is completely free of cost and without any strings attached. Even more so for the Hindi one twice its size!

Those of us who are regularly on the internet don't realize it so soon, but to the people seeing it and experiencing it for the first time, this was something amazing. There has never been anything like this seen before. They were at it like moths to a flame, and when they reached the article on Shivaji, the response was ecstatic! They then searched for their respective hometowns and on not finding sufficient info somewhere, they immediately told us they want to update it on Wikipedia the next time they get their hands on the internet! This all happened in a village in Raigad district, Maharashtra. Suddenly, by just giving an offline version, we had created potential future Wikipedia Marathi contributors - not some geeks in a metro but teachers in a village! On why they wanted to edit, they told us in a matter-of-fact manner they were grateful to Wikipedia for giving so much content for free and so they felt impelled to give back and make it even better.

Anyways, I digress. We duly told them that these english-full, hindi, marathi versions can be used by them but the WFSOE is meant for school kids. Before us they were themselves sure of that!

So if the blog post I'm long-commenting on is concerned about the impending social catastrophe arising from adult-content wikipedia offline versions (yeah, like it's porno-pedia or something!) being distributed to innocent school children, I'm afraid the author has been blogging up the wrong tree here and my apologies that a mis-read email wasted the author's precious time, though after a review I honestly can't find anything wrong with it. (The email. The blog post - let's not say more!)

Actually, come to think of it, it would make an awesome Indian news channel story -
आज की सनसनी खेज़ खबर! विकिपीडिया ने बाटा विज्ञान के बहाने मासूम बच्चों को अडुल्ट कंटेंट वाली CD ! कौन हैं यह दरिंदे? आखिर क्या चाहते हैं येह लोग ?? क्या इसमें हो सकता है विदेशी हात? देखते रहिये, बकवास खबरें!

****LOL!*****

Changing profile/index location for Kiwix on Windows

2011-02-27T00:12:00.001+05:30

Quick primer : Go to http://tinyurl.com/WFSOE

Changing profile / index location for Kiwix on Windows. This can also be taken as a guide for pre-installing indexes for your zim files.

1. Go to a path like this: E:\Users\NIKHIL\AppData\Roaming\www.kiwix.org\Kiwix
--this path is for Windows 7 and Vista and on my PC the OS is on E: drive; for Windows XP it would probably be like
C:\Documents and Settings\Nikhil\Application Data\www.kiwix.org\Kiwix

2. Open profiles.ini to edit (just double-click or open with Notepad or whatever text editor you use)
Add these lines to whatever’s already there:

[Profile1]
Name=Localize
IsRelative=0
Path=C:\Kiwix Profile
Default=1

----------------
3. Make the new folder (“C:\Kiwix Profile” here), leave it empty, run kiwix once and then close it. After running you'll find all sorts of files have been created inside "C:\Kiwix Profile".

4. Shift the index folder from old to this new profile folder and rename it to something legible like "wikipedia_en_wp1_0.8_45000+_12_2010_rc1.zim.idx" (note: this is a folder, not a .idx file. All index folders have .idx or .index at the end.) so you can identify it with your zim file rather than those weird long alphanumeric names. See the library.xml in the old profile folder to figure out which .idx folder is for which zim file in case you’ve loaded multiple zims by now.

In case you don’t have it already, I’ve uploaded some indexes (incl. for the latest english wikipedia zim) on this shared online folder: http://www.4shared.com/dir/ua44LHvy/Indexes.html You can directly download and unzip them to the new profile (using 7-zip).

5. Open library.xml inside the profile in a text editor and make a change like this:
<library current="4dd18dea-9afd-080a-080a-50c68d62072f5675"><book id="4dd18dea-9afd-080a-080a-50c68d62072f5675" path="C:\Wikipedia\wikipedia_en_wp1_0.8_45000+_12_2010_rc1.zim" last="1298420521" indexPath="C:\Kiwix Profile\wikipedia_en_wp1_0.8_45000+_12_2010_rc1.zim.idx" indexType="xapian"/></library>

Take care of your absolute paths.

6. To add more indexes, simply repeat the steps and remember to vary the ‘book id’ variable in library.xml. Also you may set last=”undefined”. It should all be between the <library …> </library> tags.

7. Now run Kiwix again. Hopefully it should be done.

Volunteer your bandwidth for a few days for a collaborative mass educational download effort and let's make history!

2011-02-25T20:31:00.000+05:30

Hi All,

I came across Khan Academy a coupe of months ago. It's an amazing phenomenon of one man starting a lone mission to spread education using a microphone and MS Paint, and how his efforts have by now helped thousands of students understand basic concepts in several subjects. Attached is a screenshot from a brilliant lesson that teaches complex multiplication simply.

I've recently found that they've released all their videos free for all. Not only that, they've also opened them up to netizens for dubbing in any language. It's an amazing educational resource that should be spread everywhere - even more so where there is limited or no internet connection. They can even be used as training materials for teachers in under resourced schools.

So I've started downloading the whole lot for spreading to schools in Pune where I live, using a Torrent they've published (strictly no money involved! I'll just use my portable HDD!). But it's huge - 28.9GBs - and I have a very slow connection.

But it's all neatly divided into subjects and chapters so while I'm downloading the initial Maths ones, you can take History, one more can do a chapter in Physics, and so on! Then once we're done we can all meet up and combine them all. This can be done in less than a week if enough of us work as a team - anyways we are so prolific at downloading movies and all - so let's do something for all the students in our city for a change! (and legal too! :P)

How we'll collaborate : Browse to this wiki site:
http://education.wikia.com/wiki/Khan_Academy_torrent_download

You can scroll to the table, press the Edit button, put in your name & contact (phone, email, twitter handle, anything) next to a chapter of your choice to indicate that you're downloading it. Put "in progress" in the last column. Once done, go there again and enter the date of completion. It's that simple - no coding or tech expertise needed!

So here's an open Call for a Mass Collaborative Educational Download effort! This will probably be the first campaign of its kind happening in Pune, so here's a chance for you to be a part of history and make a positive impact on the society!

If you're not familiar with torrents and downloading, you must know someone who is! (Who gives you all the movies??) Do share the web page on facebook / twitter, forward this email and spread the word!

Note to friends in other cities : you can copy the table over and start a similar thing for your city on that wiki page as well!

Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
Teach For India Fellow, 2011-13
www.nikhilsheth.tk
Find me on: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google | RangDe
Join me on: Pune Documentary Club | Let's Do it Pune | Toastmasters in Pune | Wikipedia For Schools project

Disclaimer :Only download if you're sure you have an unlimited GBs broadband internet connection or you'll end up with a big bill ~!~

News coverage for Wikipedia for Schools project

2011-02-16T01:17:00.002+05:30

The Wikipedia for Schools project got a small but incredibly helpful mention in Hindustan Times, Mumbai, on Sunday 13th Feb 2011 !

See on the far right under "Pune" !

all image credit to HT, source

Click here to see the article on HT website.
Special thanks to Radhika Raj, journo at Hindustan Times!

Here's the text:
Pune Wikimedians are compiling CDs of select English Wikipedia articles for free distribution to schools across the state that have no internet access. Last month, an early copy of the CD was handed over to a municipal school in Pune as an experiment. "The students had never seen an encyclopedia before", says electrical engineer Nikhil Sheth, 25, the man behind the project. "Some logged on to read about the history of the Taj Mahal, others started exploring pages related to animals."

>>I'm extremely grateful for the publishing, but, well... don't expect a newspaper to have full accuracy when they have to economize on words... also they have to write it for the layman... so here are some corrections, though perfectly understandable I have to share them...

It's DVD or the package is in a USB drive... size is 2.7GBs so it can't really fit on a CD.
We might do compiling select articles later, right now it was "Wikipedia for Schools 2008/09" selection created by the SOS Childrens Villages in collaboration with Wikimedia, and the very portable and easy-to-proliferate DVD/USB package was created by some ingenious people behind Kiwix.org and OpenZIM.
Handed over... more like went below every table, stuck the USB cord in the behinds and installed in each computer!
The students hadn't seen a digital encyclopedia before... books they must have had a peek for sure.
I wish I'd been identified as a to-be Teach For India fellow or an IT professional instead of electrical engineer... I haven't been an electrical engineer since I graduated ;)

The pic was taken in Shantabai Ladkat School, Nanapeth, Pune - the first school where I installed Wikipedia for Schools. In the pic it's loaded on Teach For India Fellow Kaushik's netbook; After demo'ing it there, I'd gone and installed it in the computer lab. Here's the original:

Want to get in on the action? Browse over to http://tinyurl.com/WFSOE, sign up and join the movement to empower schools across India and the world!

get your copy of Wikipedia for Schools +more at at GNUnify 2011, SICSR Pune, today and tomorrow

2011-02-11T09:32:00.000+05:30

Hi Wikipedians and Friends,

I'll be there all day today at SICSR Pune (http://gnunify.in/) and will also transfer to someone at the college; anybody interested in getting a DVD-ready copy of Wikipedia for Schools Offline Edition, you can copy it from us here. Bring a USB or computing device with min 2.7GB free space.

I'm very grateful for the organizers at GNUnify for giving a generous slot tomorrow (12th Feb, 11:45am) to talk and discuss about Wikipedia for Schools project. Please attend! You can read up more on it on http://tinyurl.com/WFSOE

I'm also bringing the dumps of :
Wikipedia English Dec 2010 selection (wikipedia_en_wp1_0.8_45000+_12_2010_alpha1.zim, 3.74GB),
Hindi Wikipedia (wikipedia_hi_all_01_2011_beta1.zim, 483MB),
Marathi Wikipedia (wikipedia_mr_all_01_2011_beta1.zim, 212MB),
Gujrati Wikipedia (wikipedia_gu_all_01_2011_beta1.zim , 112MB)

All these can of course be downloaded online from http://tmp.kiwix.org/zim/0.9/
(Due thanks to Emmanuel and Kiwix team for speedy creation of the Indian language dumps!)

So see you there, and let's bridge the internet divide, using the Largest Ebooks ever Created ! (sorry, couldn't resist using that!)

Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
Teach For India Fellow, 2011-13
www.nikhilsheth.tk
Find me on: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google | RangDe
Join me on: Pune Documentary Club | Let's Do it Pune | Toastmasters in Pune | Wikipedia For Schools project

Cover letter for Wikipedia For Schools

2011-02-09T13:43:00.002+05:30

I was asked by a school principal to prepare a letter describing the Wikipedia For Schools so the school trustees can get to know about it before giving their permission to install in in their computer lab. This is where a realization dawned : I had till then just assumed I'd pass on the URL and whoever needs to know will see it and know. It's not so, and I'm glad I was made to sit and create a cover letter as it solidified the initiative. I'm sharing the cover letter here. Please evaluate it and give any recommendations in the comments section.

======================

Date: 9^th February 2011

Respected Sir / Madam,

Sub: Permission to install Wikipedia For Schools Offline Edition in computer lab

I am a Teach For India volunteer and will be joining TFI as a fellow this year (2011-13). I'm presently involved with a grassroots volunteer project where we want to spread an offline version of Wikipedia (largest online encyclopedia in the world), specifically made for school children from ages 8 to 17, to schools all over the country. For details please visit http://www.tinyurl.com/WFSOE

I would like to request permission to install this encyclopedia in the computer lab of your respected institution so that the students and teachers can benefit from it. There are no costs or charges involved.

The package is of 2.7GBs size and can be easily installed or copied from a DVD or a USB Drive to any computer in under 10 minutes. The software running it is Kiwix (http://www.kiwix.org), an open source free reader created for this purpose. We may need to also install "Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 drivers" (included, free) to make it run properly on older computers. Wikipedia For Schools is distributed for free and non-commercial use for spreading to schools around the world. Below is a paragraph quoted from their press release on http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/archive/2008/10/2008-wikipedia-for-schools :

Press Release: Wikipedia for Schools

Oct 22, 2008 12:00 PM

SOS Children UK, in coordination with the Wikimedia Foundation, has released a complete 2008/9 revision of the Wikipedia Selection for Schools, which is perhaps the most successful "checked content" project derived from the English Wikipedia. Previous revisions have been distributed off-line widely across the globe including by the Shuttleworth Foundation to South Africa Schools, by the Hole in the Wall project to rural Indian children and through SOS offices worldwide. The updated selection has the content of a 20 volume encyclopaedia - with 34,500 pictures, 20 million words and articles on more than 5500 topics….

….SOS Children's Villages is best known as the world's largest orphan charity (UK Charity No. 1069204) but is also a very large educational charity running 192 schools with 91,000 pupils in the developing world. See www.soschildren.org

To check the contents of this encyclopedia, you can visit http://schools-wikipedia.org which is an online version of the same package. This project has been successfully implemented in Shantabai Ladkat English Medium School in Nanapeth, Pune (contact: TFI Fellow Moiz, 9819117826). I look forward working with your esteemed institution on this project.

Yours Faithfully,
Nikhil Sheth
Teach For India Fellow, 2011-13
Previously working with Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.
Contact: 966-583-1250, nikhil.js@gmail.com

================================
..So... ok??

Points to note:
1. I want to give them a complete and honest picture of what will be going into their computers, so they don't tell later that "Hey, you didn't tell us about this!".
2. The non-commercial, moneyless nature of the project is to be stressed and specified as early as possible so they can be assured that no one is after their school's limited money.
3. The persons we're working with may only have a rudimentary knowledge of computers. They typically are very fearful of viruses, are prone to labeling anything that doesn't work at first try as having "virus". One teacher informed me there was a virus in her comp because she couldn't get through the account creation stage of gmail successfully. (this is one of the reasons we must spread an encyclopedia - to inform people and dispel rumors)
4. The text above is already a one-full-pager so no more additions please - suggest replacements and deletions only if you must.

Gandhi's bane and Hitler's boon

2011-02-07T10:29:00.001+05:30

Gandhi's bane : Because people labeled him a Mahatma, they assume no one else can do the good things he did.

Hitler's boon : Because people label him so, they assume their own leaders can never do the kind of atrocities he did.

Both are wrong.

Don't stereotype, people. All humans are humans. You are singularly capable of being both Gandhi and Hitler - the choice is yours.

The Search for the best Video compression

2011-01-28T07:56:00.001+05:30

I woke up a little too early this morning, and took the time to do some photo and video managing.

Handling videos is always a problem – the files from the camera are usually way too large – like, 915MB for a 12 min video!

So the obvious thing to do is to convert them. So the search for the best possible quality with the lowest possible ‘MB’ footprint begins. Mine has been continuing, like… forever! I then looked to Youtube for inspiration – they now have great quality streaming videos, and obviously they must be very meticulous about the file size to ensure maximum users can watch. I checked and they can put 2 mins of good quality (default) video into 3.65 MB! Wow!

The video codec used there is .H264 – a relatively new, apparently open-source codec that’s now being adopted across the world especially for HD Video. Before we had DivX and then a proprietary-less XviD as well… this seems like the next thing.

So after some trials and errors I’ve zeroed in on a compression setting that manages to keep my videos in good quality – good enough to play back fullscreen without cringing too much – and low enough size. Although I still can’t manage to get down to Youtube’s ratio without sacrificing quality – I guess it even depends on the processor – they must be having some powerful stuff doing the encoding! I’m using FormatFactory free software, and the setting is: [AVI HD AVC(H264) 480x360]

Some screenshots:

Start FormatFactory and select the ‘All to Mobile Device’ under Video on the left sidebar

Drag in all your files on the next screen. Don’t press OK yet! Click on ‘Output Setting’.

At the next screen “More Devices”, on left pane, Under ‘HD AVC(H264)’, choose “AVI HD AVC(H264) 480x360” and press OK.

Now you come back to your videos list. Press OK to start converting. See the other settings – where you want the output files to be, etc. I prefer to have them in the source folder only.

Result:

So, I got a 12min video down from 937MB to 65MB! And quality.. well, I can’t exactly show you the videos, but here are screenshots:

Before:

After:

So it’s not too grainy, decent enough, and the MB footprint reduced to less than 1/10th. The final video is about 5MBs per minute. So as of now this is the compression setting I’ll recommend. But the search, as always, continues ~~

Oh, and get the K-Lite Code Pack to play any and all videos with any video player on your computer.

Teach For India Mindmap

2011-01-24T20:59:00.000+05:30

Here's a Mindmap I've started!

Troubleshooting the Wikipedia For Schools Offline Edition + Call to Action

2011-01-22T08:11:00.002+05:30

That big term shall henceforth be referred to as WFSOE (wow, sounds like a cool game! As it should!)
In my pilot drive at Shantabai Ladkat school in Nanapeth, Pune, I came across some issues when installing WFSOE on some older computers: The indexing process never took off. Now, indexing is what kicks in the first time you open a .zim file in the primary form of Kiwix (the software used here.. look, just go with it, ok?) – it’s necessary if you want to be able to Search thru the WFSOE. So that’s a dilemma : a whole encyclopedia and we can’t even search our favorite topics! So, started looking around.. and thanks to a comment on my original post on WFSOE, I started downloading the pre-indexed, ready-to-DVD version of WFSOE that the awesome folks at Kiwix.org prepared:
http://download.kiwix.org/portable/wikipedia_en_for_schools.zip
Note: Don’t start downloading it yet – it’s freakin’ huge – 2718MB direct download! And, as in many such ventures, I detected a problem only AFTER fully dloading it over 3 days! I can’t say whether the issue is there in the original file hosted on kiwix.org or if it crept in during my downloadathon, but that’s just it – huge file direct download = Russian Roulette. This blog post is the story of that issue, how I hacked my way past it, and the solutions for anyone who wants to download a good, awesome, readily working version of WFSOE. To make things interesting, we’ve got screenshots galore!
Expand this article to read thru it… long length!
If you’re looking for the wiki page, http://education.wikia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_For_Schools_Offline_Edition (short URL: http://tinyurl.com/WFSOE)

If you’re just looking for the Call to Action, go to the very end after expanding.

“You must be the change you want to see in the world” – M K Gandhi

So, let’s begin… here’s the downloaded .zip file – all 2718 MBs of it:

---------------
Opening it in 7-Zip Portable:

-----------
I extracted it the first time itself, but just pressing the Test button reveals the error:

Now that’s a bummer. The schools….rc5.zim file is the MAIN file here – it’s the 2.something GB behemoth that’s a compressed archive of all the htmls, images and everything else that makes up the miracle that is the WFSOE. To put things in perspective : It’s one of the largest ebooks created by mankind. The rest of the stuff in the whole zip archive are just the software for running this baby.
------------
Fortunately, I’d already obtained that .zim file separately from elsewhere! Incidentally, I’ve even set up a mirror website that hosts this behemoth in parts, you can go get it from there: http://wikipediaforschools.4shared.com (look for the “schools-…rc5.zim in parts” folder).
So, I now opened the extracted WFSOE folder and made my way to the place where I had to make the switch:

-----------------
It’s the data \ content folder in case you can’t see the images. There, I found a 645mb broken version of our .zim file. Renamed it and copied over my *working* .zim file!

----------------
And.. now for the test run! Go to the main folder of the extracted archive, go into autorun folder and run autorun.exe

--------------
And voila…

Updated : Use the Install option to put it into the computer. You can change the install directory if you don't want it all the way in Program Files etc. It says 42MB but that's a small typo : After installing the software, the whole 2.6GB ZIM files is also copied over to the system. It also creates a shortcut to "Kiwix" in start menu; I recommend you copy that shortcut to the desktop and rename it "Wikipedia for Schools", or even drag it to the startup folder so it starts up every time the computer starts. For now, I just went with the first option, “Launch Kiwix from here".
--------------------------
And IT WORKED!!! WEEEEE!!! Here’s some screenshots.. of the main home page that first loads, then the Subject Index where categories are given, then 2 shots of random articles I searched my way to. Click on them to enlarge (Duh)

-------------------
A LITTLE EXPLORATION
Hacking into this pre-indexed business,

Oh. So I’m gonna have to… for this little …
Ohhhhh @#$#$#$@&%^%.
---------------
MORE FIXES:
In case you can’t get this thing to run or to search, it may be some drivers missing. From the main folder, go to Install folder and run vcredist_x86.exe . May the Force be with you.
--------------
THE CHALLENGE
To proliferate this ready-to-run version across the world. I’ll also have to put in something at the top level so people don’t get confused. (The autorun.inf isn’t for humans, and if you’re just copying the dump over a pen drive, you need to know what to run, and many people are too scared to fool around the place like I do).

….thought process….

Ok! I’ll have to post 2 versions :
One – the whole thing, re-packaged. This time I’ll do a 7-zip (.7z) instead of .zip – it’s freeware, got better compression and it can split itself into parts.
Two – Like me, there must be others who have got the .zim file already. For them, Just the supporting file structure (most importantly the pre-indexed stuff) should be enough; they can then just copy the .zim file into the data\content folder the same way I did. So, gotta make a separate zim-less archive for that too. I’ll host both of them on my mirror website : http://wikipediaforschools.4shared.com

Update: Get the second one directly here

It’ll take some time over my humble 256kbps broadband connection, but I’ll do the zim-less version first and then go for the longer haul. Give this a day, ok?
Update: Done! Full pre-indexed version available here
---------------------
SOME MOTIVATIONAL CRAP
So… here’s a stupid question I get asked: Why am I doing this? Am I a trustee of wikipedia or of WFSOE or something? Do I know the guys who made this? Am I a person holding any position? A guy with any resources? Was I hired for this?
NO.
I haven’t spent a dime in all this nor am I getting anything for it, nor do I want to. I’ve downloaded the stuff off the free web, used 7-zip, a totally free compression utility and my mirror site hosting these large things is 4shared – on a free account! (10GB limit, FYI. Their uploader utility’s awesome and they don’t ask difficult questions or screen out benign exe’s like some other idiots I won’t name here).
I’m just an ordinary guy who wants to do his part in eliminating educational inequity. (ohh yeah, really rubbing it in, aren’t I!) The driving force here is a little bit more intrinsic.
Friends, this is a mission : To take the WFSOE to each and every non-internet-connected computer in the world. So that we can bridge the educational divide and give all those millions of kids access to humanity’s largest knowledge resource – for Freeee, and that too when they need it : in their childhood instead of after they’ve turned adults! We can’t wait for the fancy high speed internet to go everywhere and that too be free to all. That will happen later, but we can do THIS right NOW, from the grassroots. Having a proper ready-to-go version that can be downloaded by one and all is critical here.
Wikipedia have done their part in creating an amazing encyclopedia.
SOS Children’s Village have done their part in hand-picking the best articles for school children and creating the Wikipedia For Schools.
Kiwix.org have done their bit in compiling all of it into a .ZIM archive that we can use without the decompression hassles of some other offline website readers. And they even made a pre-indexed ready-to-DVD version that we can just copy and run anywhere.
Several organizations all over the world are doing their part in getting computers donated to low resource schools where kids from lower economic backgrounds can get a chance to use them. But most of them don’t have the WFSOE.
And now it’s OUR turn.
This cause needs OUR HELP. Get the WFSOE. Go copy it to every computer you can get your sweaty hands on! Pass the baton on - Get your friends in on the action! Spread the word! Here’s the wiki page set up to co-ordinate this effort – enlist yourself as a WFSOE Champion and get to work!
http://education.wikia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_For_Schools_Offline_Edition

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” - Margaret Mead

Nikhil Sheth
+91-9665831250
Pune, India
Teach For India Fellow, 2011-13 (just a volunteer at the time of writing this)
nikhil.js [at] gmail.com

Images from Teach For India

2011-01-20T13:41:00.002+05:30

I think I'll let the images do the talking here! (Click to enlarge)