retarc

11:50 pm - What infuriated me last week

India, a great place for religious equality?

... similar sting operation should be done on madarsas and missionaries.

Lets worship some Fraudmen

The irony that is the USA

Reservation issue

There was food on the plate. Just when we are about to eat, they took the plate away

Freedom of Speech?

The Supreme Court overruled the "Maratha" government's ban on James Laine's book on Shivaji. This week, the same court blessed the state and central governments' power to ban books and newspapers. Now, for every book/article, do we have to take a case to the Supreme Court to know if a ban is valid or not?

Minister "burns" files after losing UP elections

01:23 am - Web 2.0 style website for a .gov.in domain?

After years of total disgust whenever I came across a poorly designed Indian administration website, I was pleasantly surprised today. I always used to wonder whom these websites were contracted to, and how come so many different companies in India were so incompetent, with respect to web design. I know good design is a subjective topic, but there are still some set of guidelines which the set of tubes has come to accept as what is good and what is not. Recently, the Dutch government released a set of guidelines to ensure websites be more accessible. The Indian websites seemed to follow none, and remained in the gory days of yore with geocities type backgrounds, banners, marquee text, small font, and all.

The Election Commission of India website blew me away. The site has good presentation of content, use of CSS to separate content and style, and heck, even Web 2.0 (whatever that means) type gradients and link styles, large fonts, and a consistent interface. I am sure visitors will find this site pleasant. I feel the navigation bar on the left could have been designed better, but that is highly subjective. Oh, and they even use google analytics tracking for the main page.

Update: The website has a developer forum. Okay, not exactly a forum, but some information for developers. This page provides various search algorithms under an MIT style license. Hey Election commission of India, please listen. You are not supposed to do this. You cannot develop code and give it away for free. Don't you know what intellectual property means? Protect your IP. And what crap, links going to Wikipedia? Wikipedia has a bunch of jerks fighting over what to say. This does not reflect well on the Election Commission. And now you encourage MySQL, Postgres, OpenOffice.org and make all data available in non-proprietary formats? First, you are not even supposed to know what these terms mean. Stick to MS-Word and Frontpage. And data in XML format? You shouldn't be making data available in the first place. Whomever is in charge of all this, please fire the technical team. They reflect bad on our great Indian tradition. And now, politicians will make data available publicly in their websites, MPs will stop fighting in the Parliament? Come on, they are elected to throw chairs at each other.

12:14 am - Ramblings of a broken heart

The following are from a guy's perspective.

• You successfully get over shock and anger. But perennially oscillate between denial and acceptance.
• Once in a while you ponder, or rather hope, maybe she'll give a call asking, "Can we see if it could work now?"
• For an instant you think a new person in your life would turnaround everything for the better. Further thought shows 0therwise, and the difficulty of convincing your mind and heart to even consider thinking about someone else.
• As a positive fallout, you begin appreciating the small things in life more --- the cool breeze, the smell of rain, the flowers of spring, ... You badly want to show them something nice you saw, but can't.
• Every success in other parts of your life, reminds you of missing the person you wanted in your life. You are not spared when things go bad either. When things go wrong, you know you can face anything, confident that your worst adversity is past you.
• You long to go back in time to redo things in a better way, or to stay out of them completely.
• Even if they have mentally hurt you, you cannot but wish good for them.
• Replaying the good and bad things that happened, brings in a kind of pleasure, more like an addiction. Once you wake out of your dream, painful realization creeps in that you have a real life to live.
• You are surprised seeing yourself alive.
• You have only yourself to blame, but still want to ask, "Couldn't you have done better for me?"
• Enough time is spent mourning, you have no time for friends. Alcohol and tobacco are your most intimate companions.
• You never stop wondering how things would have been different and sweet.
• You know you need to change the way you think and act, but can't.

Current Mood: depressed

12:50 pm - Cute Tamil kid recollecting US state capitols

This is a really cool video on Youtube. In fact today it is a featured video. Kids are always cute, but the cutest part of this video is just after 2:05 minutes. Madhava is asked "Alabama?" and he answers "Sollitane." ("I have already answered").

10:30 pm - Google news and AP news feeds

Google news does a good job providing links to stories from various sources about one event. But the problem is, most websites subscribe to the Associated Press news feed. All the links on Google news end up being AP news links. It takes quite some effort in finding out non-AP stories by journalists in local newspapers. One heuristic I use is, events in a place are covered extensively by journalists in that area. Sadly, I do not have a better one.

03:48 pm - Cool Tamil Hip-hop

This is a really cool Tamil Hip-hop video. Good pleasant music as well. Available on Youtube.

06:54 pm - Enslaved by music

Today I was listening to "Evarani" a Thyagaraja krithi in the ragam Devaamrithavarshini. I was captivated by the song. I found various renditions of the same song by various artistes and all were great. I am no great expert of Carnatic music, so I am unable to talk about the technical merit of a song, but I just liked it so much. For about two hours or so, I behaved as though I was on drugs, listening to various versions again and again. How on earth could those lines be so beautiful? I don't know if it is due to the Ragam, or due to Thyagaraja's genius, but it was awesome.

I ended up weeping, and finally crying loudly, before going to bed.

How about you? Can you recollect a similar experience you've had?

03:15 pm - Hole in the wall

I read a really moving article about what happens when to give a computer with an internet connection to poor kids in India. Something must be done to improve the lives of underprivileged children in India and the rest of the world. The government is not going to anything about this. People should join hands to help others.

Here is the link to the article and reddit's discussion page on this article. Yes, I found this through reddit.

12:27 pm - Logical consistency of invasion in Iraq

Over the past couple of years there has been a lot of debate about morality, legality and viability of the war in Iraq. In this post, I am trying to look at the similarities and differences between the US-led invasion and the holy war fought by the various Islamic fundamental groups. Let it be clear that I am not taking one side or the other --- it seems beyond my intellectual abilities to come to a clear conclusion.

The original goal of invading Iraq was to find Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in the country. What was thought to be quick operation, or that is what we were told, has now been going on for more than three years. Midway through the conflict, the President of the USA, George W. Bush, revealed (or seemed to cook up) a new motivation for the war --- the blooming of holy democracy in Iraq in particular and the Middle East in general.

The various Islamic fundamentalist groups, right from the Muslim Brotherhood to Al-Qaeda today, have sort of tried to create an Islamic government. It is clear from their writings that they do not accept the western way of life, and consider it immoral, and wish to change this earth for what they think is the better.

Now, what is the difference between the US trying to force its way of government on the Islamic world and the fundamentalist organizations trying to force their point of view on the western world? I don't see any. Any difference between the level of violence employed by the two groups has been obliterated by the US invasion.

The western world holds the attack by the various terrorist groups on civilians and their infrastructure, against these groups in a big way. What bewilders me is what authorizes the west to attack soldiers in uniform? Do these leaders think they are right because they are party to some convention or treaty? It is a different story altogether that a lot of civilians get killed in the legal war, and I am not getting in to that. Israel is happily killing innocent civilians in a country that does not have access to the sophisticated weapons supplied by the USA; and the powers of the world authorize it.

Aren't terrorist activites as a part of Jihad authorized by the Islamic rules? In fact Jihad is said to be duty. Jihad has a legal backing in the same way conventional war does.

It should however be pointed out that these two groups do not agree on one legal framework.

The president of the USA was re-elected based on various promises of bringing Democracy to Iraq, and the people of the USA view imposition of something they like on a totally unrelated group a people a good thing. These terrorist organizations and their leaders enjoy the support of their own people, based on the promise of inducing the perfect way of life throughout the world.

Both groups value something, though what they value might not be the same. This reflects in the way each group acts --- one group values life, and the other, death.

To me it seems that the two sides, the western governments and the Islamic groups are so similar to each other, in what they are doing. Am I missing something fundamental here? Could someone please point that out?