anonymuncule

Kinta sare hain jasbaat, kitne he armaan, machalte hai jo dil se hoto tak aane ko.
Per na jane kyo kabhi main unko shabd nahi de pati aur kabhi awaaz.
--शोभना

Highway all the way...

All Roads Lead to Cities, Transforming India from NYTimes

Hmmm what I am wondering after reading the articles in NYTimes is that there is nothing in India except the highways? It seems to project that everything else was in a complete state of mess adn the highwys are changing this... not sure how much of this is true and how much is just hype sourrounding the highways. But why so much hype about this?

India found its niche in the cutting and polishing of low-cost diamonds for the global middle class, and today more than 7 of 10 diamonds in the world are polished in Surat. It has created close to 500,000 jobs here alone.
That is nearly half as many jobs as India's entire information technology industry.
Bangalore, the symbol of India's knowledge economy, may be a global buzzword, but the fate of India's rural poor depends more on industrial cities like Surat.
Together, the cities' dominance means that India will never return to a farming-based economy. The urban portion of the gross domestic product is roughly double the urban population, a fact not lost on Mr. Santoki or his boss, Savji Dholakia.

Women of Al Qaeda from MSNBC Newsweek

Jihad used to have a gender: male. The men who dominated the movement exploited traditional attitudes about sex and the sexes to build their ranks. They still do that, but with a difference: even Al Qaeda is using female killers now, and goading the men.

THis is not the summary nor the most interstin part of the article. But I simply could not decide which part to pick to took the introduction and quoted it. Never have I understood it nor do I think I will ever understand it how can people kill and on top of that the reasons sound well unreasonable.

Trucks Highways India and AIDS

On India's Roads, Cargo and a Deadly Passenger from NYTimes

Some 80 percent of truckers' wives who came in for voluntary testing and counseling tested positive, she said, usually because by the time they came in their husbands were on their deathbeds, and denial could no longer be sustained.

G. Karuna, 24, was another woman who fell prey to the peregrinations of her husband, a long-distance driver from a family of truckers. When they both sought treatment for tuberculosis or opportunistic infections at hospitals, they hid his occupation, since many private hospitals now turn truckers away.

After her husband died, his family blamed her, a cruel vengeance some in-laws inflict on the widows. They have made treatment and prevention that much harder.

She was forced to sleep on the path outside; the family refused to share even a loaf of bread that she had touched. Soon their whole village had ostracized her.

Ms. Karuna cried as she told her story, but that story also conveyed an uncommon
strength. She had left her husband's family and her village to start a new life on her own. She became an activist with the Social Educational and Economic evelopment Society, an advocacy group in Guntur, trying to save other truckers'
wives.

She showed women pictures of her handsome husband before he sickened, and after.

She told the wives to know what their husbands were doing outside the home, to negotiate the use of condoms with them, to get treated for sexually transmitted diseases. Her husband's relatives still teased her: "Why are you working so hard? You also will die."

thought

What is achievement?

quote

Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation.
-- Author Unknown

A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
-- Thomas Carlyle

Indian view on HWYs

Impoverishing roads from The Hindu