Raag- Saakhi

कूदक फुदक कर फुर फुर चिड़िया कर गयी सर पर बीट,
पुष-कर बटन दबावे फिर भी कम न होवे हीट,
Cattle क्लास, खा गयी घास, कहाँ बिछावे सीट,
मोदी काका लगे उड़ाने दुष्ट गुलाबी कीट,
जन-जन-मन को जो भरमावे, तख्ते तोड़े ताज उडावे,
की-बोर्ड पर कीं कीं गावे, कौन है ऐसा ढीठ ?
क्यों सखी साजन ?
ना सखी Tweet .

Nice one - Its India

Cheer up my son, buck up my boy,
You are living in 'The Land of Joy'.
You go to school where they do not teach,
In the House of God, they hatred preach.
If you have merit, you will sigh and sob,
If you are backward, you might get a job.
Out of caste, if you dare to wed,
Your kith and kin will chop your head.
If you are honest, in north or in south,
You will live from hand to mouth.
If you are wily and your means sinister,
You are likely to become a chief minister.
But remember the new maxim, my lad,
Defection is good, conversion is bad.
- From GC Bhandari - Meerut

Globetrotter Game - For those who love maps - Try this

Educational Games

Educational Games

Corruption Story # 1

Timeframe : 1st week of December 2008

Place : Lucknow, Ministers' office in the legislative assembly.

Actors :

To -> Education Minister of a state, Secretary for higher Education

From -> Managing committee members of a College
Story :
The college planned to start two new post-graduate courses and filed an application with higher education ministry in mid of 2008. There was no response till November end (even on followups).

Sometime in December we went to the Secretary (had to grease palms to arrange meetings).
The officer there was a typical example of 'Sarkaari afsar' , old, sluggish, yawny, frowny, full of excuses.. in all hard to move to work.

The first reaction was, I dont remember we got a request for approval. Then it was, come some other day, we will see if we have the file. On persisting further, it changed to wait-for-a-while-and-I-will-call-you kind of response. We kept sitting in front of him. After some time, the file was brought. There was a 5 word response from the minister

"अगले सत्र में विचार हेतु" (To be discussed in next session) !!

Why ??
Do you understand what next session would mean ?
Do you know that next session means 60 odd students will study the subject they did not plan to ?? They will loose the battle before they enter it...

He simply re-read the note and gave us a now-we-are-talking look. We understood the look within fraction of a second. Why wont we ? We are so used to this. However we knew we need to build the story forward. Here is the conversation..

"सर, बच्चों के भविष्य का सवाल है, आप इसी सत्र में देख लीजिये "(Sir, this is question of career for the children। Please see if it can be done within this session)। We pleaded।

"देखा नही आपने, मंत्री जी ने क्या लिखा है" ( You dont see that it is final now). That meant it would be a bigger amount. (Saala bada muh phadega).

"Its you who can make this happen sir, please let us know if we can do some 'sewa'. You are the only one who can talk to mantriji and move this for this session." We came to the point, early.

"देखिये काम थोड़ा टेढा है, बहुत सा urgent files बचा है", he said, without raising his head. We knew its just a routine act, just to raise the price.

"आप सेवा तो बोलिए सर" (you just tell us the amount)

"Let me see", he said, went inside and came back after a while. "1.25", spat the pro.

"ठीक है, कब तक ?" (by when should we get the money)

"जितना जल्दी हो सके" (as soon as you can)

"आप फाइल आगे चलाइये, हम अगले हफ्ते आते हैं" (you move the file, we will arrange the money next week).

Mumbai Blasts : Whose fault; Joining the dots

48+ hours the battle still continues ..

200 + Dead known so far ...

~1000 Injured known so far ...

1.25 Billion Indians worried and 

~6.5 Bn World confused about India ...

Victory !!! The akas of the seperatist forces must be rejoicing. What they wanted to achieve has been achieved. They have written their success story, with blood and flesh of innocent people.

The image of India as a state who is falining to protect itself from inside and outside has been painted in red. News bytes of burning taj, crossfiring between commandoes and terrorists, photos of Indians and foreigners killes, live accounts from those rescued...; the world is seeing it all !! They precisely attacked the place where it would hurt most.  Leave tourists not thinkingof  coming to India. Big business heads will think thriice before coming to India on a business trip. So, no tour to India, no business trip to India, perhaps no business outsourcing going forward. The damage is done, the aftermath is to come.

Whom to blame ? 

The government has done the routine duty to condemn the attacks and to condole the losses. I am sure they do not read the messages from paper now. They have done it so many times that they should remember all. As usual goverment is pointing fingers towards security agencies and agencies are complaining about inaction. There are one thousand and one reasons. One which seems prominent is inability of the leaders to join the dots and think ahead of the enemy.

Its long when we started strenthning the border between India and Pakistan, making it difficult to invade. Its long (as old as 2002) that Indian intelligence got information about Lashkar operatives being trained in Marine commando techniques near Mangla dam along the Border.  Late 2006, Intelligence also learn about Faisal Haroun, a Lashkar top guy, who commanded LeT opearations from BanglaDesh. Haroun had been using a shipping network (with merchant ships and small boats) to smuggle explosives into India. 

Wasn't this good enough to give a clue and tighten the security at sea routes ? 

The Intelligence forces recommended to step up counter terrorism defences back in 2006. In 2007, evidences were found of increased Islamist activities in Maldives ( Haroun wanted to use a deserted island in Maldives as control centre for LeT activites). It was planned to set up coastal police stations, more boats, jeeps, motorcycles etc for mobility along the cost. Not even 50% of this has moved to implementation. 

What an example of negligence.

Guess what, now we will be more vigilant at sea. Will that be helpful now ?

So what will be the next innovative method of attack ? Air  ? ( remember Puruliya, how easy it was for aeroplanes to drop weapons ?).  

Until we learn to join dots, we would come to know only after we read the newspaper coloured in red !!

avoiding continuous bomb blasts in India : What is the solution ??

Great topic for debate. There would be a lot which we will leave untouched on this sensitive yet the most important topic today

As Kautilya said, " To shed the weed, weaken the roots". Here, we need to look at the root cause of the problem. Unfortunately, when we look at the root cause of the problem, we see ourselves standing in front of a mirror. It is the unrestful, dissatisfied, misguided you and me (read youth) who is behind all this. And read me, we should not segregate this youth on basis of religion. We now have Malegaon if we had others. And the people (alleged to be) involved with Malegaon are far educated, (considered to be) civilized, powerful and established compared to those involved with others.

The root cause is :- till date (majority of) Indians have not identified themselves with India. You first belong to family then community then caste then sect then religion and then if there is some room left you belong to country ( though country belongs to you in every aspect).

So incidents like Godhra, Babri and the bomb blasts are more seen as attack on one particular religion->sect->Community.. on another and not from extremism on life.

We have to come up with measures both short term and long term, which control the damage as well as clear the weed of seperationism. Easier said than done, however, for a country like India we have to choose this path if we need to keep the country united under the umbrella of democracy.

A few short term measures could be (will elaborate in some next post on these)
S1. Make the intelligence more intelligent and deep rooted
S2. Make common man participate and make them feel that they are participating in the security of the nation
S3. Taking paced action on those found guilty : There is no use in keeping those found guilty in cellars and feeding them with nutritious food from taxpayers. There are quite a few who have accepted the charge ( and have no regrets about it). Prosecute (read execute) them and advertise about that in a manner that others think twice before getting into extremism. Human rights forums will keep crying (that's what they exist for). But you loose people anyway; either by keeping it loose on law and loosing innocent many people killed in blasts or keeping it tight on law and loosing a few suspects. I am personally fine with latter.
S4 : Penalize separatist forces like MNS etc

Long term
L1 : Planning our cities for a society rather that communities and religions
L2 : ...

More to come later

Disasters : How prepared India is: Take that

Take this

• India has faced 21 out of 23 most dreading cyclones the world over in last 270 years which took toll on 6,00,000 lives
• 59 % of Indian land is quite prone to earthquake. The capital is in grade 4 zone. 18,000+ people have lost their lives in last 18 years as earth-quake calamities
• As per estimates, property worth Rs 5,000 crore is at risk from known natural disasters
• India looses 7.5 million hectare of land and 1600 people every 5 yr

And

• In India, the national disaster management authority is headed by PM
• It gets Rs. 65 Crore per year to meet its objective.
• As per the authority, their objective is to make people aware about disasters and how to cope with it (really !! , and we thought 'management' meant something else)
• In India, Disaster management is controlled by Cabinet Secretary, Home ministry, Health ministry, National Disaster Management Authority, State government ..... Which means, at the time of disaster, all of these could do nothing and blame everybody else for inaction

So, how good you think we are prepared ?