Mango Mania in US will catch up soon if they keep writting like this :)

Mango Mania in India from NYTimes

Now this article probably catches the full essance of the mango season in India from a outside point of view. Though for me it seems that there is nothing unusual when the mango season srrives... Other than ofcourse that it is "The Mango Season" :)

It sure did make me numb...

So do you expect the girl to keep count? via IndiaUncut


I couldn't agree more with the comments made by Amit on this story. Do read.

Fixing bug is a priority :)

Linux kernel 'getting buggier,' leader says from CNET

"I believe the 2.6 kernel is slowly getting buggier. It seems we're adding bugs at a higher rate
than we're fixing them," Morton said in a talk at the LinuxTag conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, on Friday.

Morton said he hasn't yet proved this statistically, but has noticed that he is getting more e-mails with bug reports. If he is able to confirm the increasing defect rate, he may temporarily halt the kernel development process to spend time resolving issues.

"A little action item I've given myself is to confirm that this increasing defect rate is really happening," he said. "If it is, we need to do something about it."

"Kernel developers will need to reapportion their time and spend more time fixing bugs," he added. "We may possibly have a bug fix-only kernel cycle, which is purely for fixing up long-standing bugs."

One problem is that few developers are motivated to work on defects, Morton said. This is particularly a problem for bugs that affect old computers or peripherals, as kernel developers working for corporations don't tend to care about out-of-date hardware, he said.

Nowadays, many kernel developers are employed by IT companies, such as hardware manufacturers. That can cause problems, as they may be motivated by self-interest, Morton suggested.

Joke

President Bush was in New Orleans. He said that, "We all pray for no hurricanes this year." This is all part of the Faith Based Disaster Management plan.
--Jay Leno

Women in "democratic" Iraq

The plight of women in Iraq from The Hindu

This is a documentary shot by an Iraqi women about the situtaion of women in iraq. A few days heard abt this documentary on one of the many news channels... here is kind of a summary to it.

The film is particularly good at capturing the texture of family life lived in such insecurity, and one effective section concentrates on the tale of a young girl, just eight years old, who was picked up by American troops after an attack on the car in which she and her father and other Iraqis were travelling. The troops first took her to a military hospital, but then her family says she was held for three months. Her family was not informed of her whereabouts and she was interrogated by being asked to identify Iraqi corpses in photographs. Her grandfather eventually tracked her down in Baghdad, and as we see her weeping in his lap we sense her family's frustration at having no accountable authority to whom it could take its anger.
...

To show the negative effects of these developments on women, Zeina travels to Basra. It will not come as news to those who have followed developments in southern Iraq that women are being forced to wear the hijab and prevented from living their lives freely. But it brings these developments home when we see young women and their families talking about being sent bullets and death threats because they played sport or did not wear a headscarf. As Zeina emphasises, this kind of experience is new to most women in Iraq, who enjoyed economic and social freedom before the occupation. "A while ago, I was looking at photographs of my aunt in college in the 60s, wearing pants and sleeveless tops, playing sports in the college yard; and then I looked at the photographs of the women in college today, and they are covered in black from head to toe, their faces also covered."

Occupation forces blamed

Zeina says the responsibility for these developments is solely that of the occupation — it has given sectarianism the opportunity to flourish. She simply laughs when I ask her whether she feels grateful for the democracy that America has given Iraq. "Democracy? What democracy? We do not have democracy. This democracy that Bush talks about — it is a completely empty structure, based on sectarian and ethnic interests. How can you have democracy when you are afraid that your life will be threatened, or your husband will be killed if you express yourself freely? It is a bad joke."

Not all women in Iraq are against the occupation — women are as divided as the men, and people in the West have heard Iraqi women speak in support of the U.S. war. But it is hard to resist the force of Zeina's passion as she describes the chaos that the war has brought to Iraq. She longs to go on documenting the situation of women, despite the very narrow limits within which she has to work.

Questioning the decision of the Umpire...

Tampering or selective control? from Cricinfo

It is next to impossible to prove - one way or the other - Bucknor's charge that television producers are deliberately making umpires look bad, and also influencing the decision-making process by showing replays of only certain angles, selectively leaving out others. But, the fact that he has made these statements has brought to the public domain something many have suspected for some time now.

In all this, umpires around the world were keen to keep a low profile. When contacted Simon Taufel and David Shepherd declined to comment, while Rudi Koertzen was unreachable.

The International Cricket Council, who have strict guidelines on the matters their members are allowed to comment on, didn't have much to add either. Brian Murgatroyd would only proffer "no comment" when attempts were made to get a reaction to Bucknor's statements, but he and his team certainly have plenty to think about now.

Maybe Bucknor's comment has opened a can of worms but I think that there is an angle that we are not looking at is that the responsibility of an appeal against the decision of the umpire is the players responsibility... It is something like the walking when you are out. If walking when you know you are out is commendable so is asking to be able to stay when you are not. But yes we will have to look at the technologies that are being used to make the final decision before completely relying on it.

The question of Afghanistan's question for India...

Indian security presence in Afghanistan from The Hindu
Read full article... it is worth it.

THE INDIAN "debate" about Afghanistan is narrowing down to a single agenda: ensuring the security of hundreds of Indian nationals involved in Indian projects in that country. Since the killing of Maniappan Ramankutty in November last, the Government began substantially augmenting the paramilitary forces deployed in Afghanistan. It reportedly decided on deploying the CRPF in Afghanistan even ahead of Suryanarayana's death last week.

It took the Dutch parliament an agonising six months to make up its mind whether a few hundred troops could be sent to Afghanistan. The "debate" deeply divided the Dutch public. An entire team of parliamentarians from the House of Commons travelled to Afghanistan at great risk to their personal safety before the parliamentary select committee could decide what conditions and preconditions had to be fulfilled before British troops were despatched to southern Afghanistan under the commitment to NATO. (Of course, senior British journalists separately travelled to Afghanistan for making their own assessment.)

India, regrettably, is yet to reach that level of sophistication in policy-making — its tragic experiences in Sri Lanka nearly two decades ago notwithstanding. Secondly, Afghanistan is — it has been for a long time and may well remain for the foreseeable future — an enigma. Ambiguities shroud every "incident" like the one involving Maniappan or Suryanarayana. Things are never quite what they may appear to be. This is inevitable when intrigues double up as politics. What Selig Harrison wrote in his classic work Out of Afghanistan — that the Soviets actually blundered into Afghanistan in 1978 — has since been borne out by the declassified archival materials of the Cold War period in Moscow and Washington. A perception was deliberately created by the Western intelligence that they were using Afghanistan as a battlefield to threaten long-term Soviet strategic interests.

That is to say, there must be greater clarity as to who killed Maniappan and Suryanarayana. All that can be said with a measure of confidence is that they were political murders (which does not make them any less horrendous). Intriguingly, Hamid Karzai did not blame the Taliban for Suryanarayana's murder. Actually, for the past few days Kabul has been excited about the new overtures being made by the United States and Mr. Karzai to the Taliban leadership for a genuinely serious political dialogue aimed at working out a credible power-sharing arrangement.

The discourse in India has been to point to the possibility of a Pakistani intelligence hand in the killing of Indian workers in Afghanistan. The possibility is fast becoming a probability. With that, the "case file" is all but closed. And, it is time to move on to modalities of augmentation of the Indian security presence in Afghanistan.

While speaking of a Pakistani animus to an Indian presence in the sensitive Afghan border regions, would we countenance with equanimity Pakistani nationals appearing in their hundreds on India's border regions with Nepal or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka? Yet another question arises. Without compromising the commitment to "reconstruct" Afghanistan's economic infrastructure, is it not possible for Indian activities to sidestep for the present the highly explosive region bordering Pakistan and instead concentrate on the west, north, east, and the centre of the country till such time as there is less volatility in Pakistan's Balochistan or Waziristan regions?