We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world. --Buddha
Srinath on ICC panel from The Hindu
Colombo: India's former pace spearhead Javagal Srinath will be part of the three-member Bowling Action Advisory Panel (BAAP) which will identify bowlers with potentially flawed actions at the ongoing ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup here.
Wal-Mart and Monsanto on Indo-U.S. Agriculture Initiative board from The Hindu
NEW DELHI: The United States-based multinationals, Wal-Mart and Monsanto, are on the board of the Indo-U.S. Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture Research and Education. It will set the agenda for collaborative farm research with Indian laboratories and agricultural universities. In India, the universities on their own and through Krishi Vigyan Kendras serve as extension agencies for farmers on the field and have a wide reach.
The influence of the American private sector became obvious to Indian scientists during the first meeting of the board in Washington DC in December 2005. Representatives of the Wal-Mart food chain and the Monsanto Seed Corporation were keen on using the Initiative for retailing in agriculture and on trade aspects. Transgenic research in crops, animals and fisheries would be a substantial part of the collaboration in biotechnology, requiring India to pledge huge funds.
Issues of Intellectual Property Rights and Benefit-Sharing were also discussed. India is endowed with rich biodiversity and has a huge bank of germ plasm and genetic resource material in the public research system.
India is looking for joint ownership or joint patents, whereas in the U.S. much of the transgenic and hybrid agricultural technology is with the corporates.
Indian Council of Agriculture Research Director-General Mangala Rai is the co-chair of the Board along with Ellen Terpstra, Administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agriculture Services. There will be seven members on each side.
Day before I was reading the alchemist while on the plane... A few people had recommended me the book and I have been wondering what the whole deal was about. Finally got chance to read it since it was gifted to me :)
It is a very simple story but it has so many implications to life. So many place I had to stop and think what did I do when I was in such a situation? Where is this applicable? All in all that tiny book has a lot of meaning. And more so for me... since probably I have to figure what is my "Personal Legend". Kind of reminds me of "The Little Prince" Which on the surface seemed to be just a cartoon but was a lot more.
Now I have moved to Memoirs of a Geisha. Another gripping book.
Democracy in a Cartoon via ALDaily
A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth.
Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the sins our fathers? Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of Bombay and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the Indians their own past: it was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India; it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past glory. British Imperialism preserved where earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples.
On the world stage, should we really apologize for Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe? Mozart, Beethoven and Bach? Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Breughel, Ter Borch? Galileo, Huygens, Copernicus, Newton and Darwin? Penicillin and computers? The Olympic Games and Football? Human rights and parliamentary democracy? The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. No, the west needs no lectures on the superior virtue of societies who keep their women in subjection, cut off their clitorises, stone them to death for alleged adultery, throw acid on their faces, or deny the human rights of those considered to belong to lower castes.
kabhi to rukhna,
kuch to khana,
dhire se palat ke phir tum guzar lena.
kabhi to muskarana,
kuch to sarahana,
dhire se akhen mila ke phir tum chura lena.
--शोभना
As each year passes it seems that it was more eventful that the previous one... And by that rule last year was the most eventful that I have had and I think next will be more so.
Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.
--Jennifer Yane
How do you pick up the threads of an old life?
How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand, there is no going back.
There are somethings that time cannot mend, some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.
--Lord of the Rings
Male Pride And Female Prejudice from NYTimes
When there are three women for every two men graduating from college, whom will the third woman marry?This is not an academic question. Women, who were a minority on campuses a quarter-century ago, today make up 57 percent of undergraduates, and the gender gap is projected to reach a 60-40 ratio within a few years. So more women, especially black and Hispanic women, will be in a position to get better-paying, more prestigious jobs than their husbands, which makes for a tricky variation of ''Pride and Prejudice.''
It's still a universal truth, as Jane Austen wrote, that a man with a fortune has good marriage prospects. It's not so universal for a woman with a fortune, because pride makes some men determined to be the chief breadwinner. But these traditionalists seem to be a dwindling minority as men have come to appreciate the value of a wife's paycheck.
...
Which means that, on average, college-educated women and high-school-educated men will have a harder time finding partners as long as educators keep ignoring the gender gap that starts long before college. Advocates for women have been so effective politically that high schools and colleges are still focusing on supposed discrimination against women: the shortage of women in science classes and on sports teams rather than the shortage of men, period. You could think of this as a victory for women's rights, but many of the victors will end up celebrating alone.
Hard truth: India is haven for child sex tourism from Hindustan Times
India has become one of the hottest child sex tourism destinations. A report, Trafficking in Women and Children in India, sponsored by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), highlights this, mentioning not just Goa, which since the 1990s has uncovered rackets by Freddy Peats and Helmut Brinkmann, but also Alleppy and Ernakulam districts of Kerala, where houseboat tourism has lately seen a boom.
...
In Mumbai, nearly 70,000 minors are abused yearly, estimates Kusumbar Choudhury of Save the Children India. Given that the sex tourism trade is as invisible as it is efficient, there are no hard numbers, but it is believed that the kids come from all corners of the country, as well as Nepal and Bangladesh.
Fraud nags at Google's grand strategy from The Hindu
JOHN CARRERAS was once a contented Google advertiser. He used text adverts that appeared alongside searches to bring people to his trade exhibition website. He happily paid Google a few cents for every referral, believing that anyone who clicked through to his site from Google was a likely customer. But then he attended a conference in Las Vegas, and he noticed something strange: the number of Google referrals he was getting dropped dramatically, only to rise again once the conference was over.Mr. Carreras became convinced the "missing clicks" were not from customers, but from his competitors, who had all been in Vegas along with him. He believed his unscrupulous rivals whiled away their office hours clicking on his Google ads, knowing that every tap cost him money.
If you add in a second kind of scam, where people earn themselves a little money from Google by clicking on ads they are hosting on their own sites, you can see the potential for malice. Click fraud, as it is called, is acknowledged by Google as a problem: last year, Google chief financial officer George Reyes described it as "the biggest threat to the internet economy."
U.S. Seeks Google Records in Pornography Inquiry from NYTimes
Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet's leading search engine -- a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance.Mountain View-based Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose for an order to hand over the requested records.
The government wants a list all requests entered into Google's search engine during an unspecified single week -- a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases.
In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yahoo Inc., which runs the Internet's second-most used search engine behind Google, confirmed Thursday that it had complied with a similar government subpoena.
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