Del.icio.us

Kovaiputhalvan told me about this web service on a rainy day. When I asked him to write the link, he immediately said, "One minute, I will send an SMS." We heartily laughed at our dependence on "new technology" while wiping few pleasant driblets of rain from our faces.

From Wikipedia:

The website del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in late 2003, and is now part of Yahoo!.

From the website:

del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. You can use del.icio.us to:

• Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
• Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite -- they've already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy.

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Sruti

Sruti is India's leading monthly magazine, started in 1983, devoted to Indian classical music and dance.

Contact details:

The Sruti Foundation,
9, Cathedral Road,
Chennai - 600086, India.


Subscription details:

One year - Rs.360 (including postages) - in India.
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Present Quandary

From a Times of India article whose abridged version is available here. The print edition article has something more. The title of the article in the print edition is also different: Future Funda

Skewed wealth distribution: “The richest 1% of all adults own 40% of all global assets. The richest 2% own 51% of all the assets in the world. And the richest 10% own 85%. The bottom half own barely 1% of the global assets.”

What about technology? What is the next big thing there? Frey feels that tomorrow’s cutting edge technology is most likely already there today. “For really revolutionary, cutting-edge technologies, the next big thing was invented 25 years ago. It takes long for people to adjust their lives and start using these revolutionary technologies,” he says. Look at the internet which was invented in 1969, 38 years ago. Or the cellphone which was invented in 1973. And ATM machines which were invented in 1939.

Auditing and Public Finance

Himanshu Upadhyaya reviews the book:

Government Accountability and Public Audit: Re-engineering the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, B P Mathur; Eastern Book Corporation, Rs.495.

He says the book tackles the question,

Public audit of an organisation or individual by a statutory authority is proven to give teeth to enforcement. Why then has India's CAG failed to instill fear in the various government departments and enterprises it monitors?

From the review,

...Mathur goes into some history of public audit in India. Like other institutions of governance in India, the structure of Indian Audit and Accounts Department (IAAD) also has the colonial legacy stretching as back as 1858, when the East India company administration was taken over by the British government. Two years after that, the independent accounting offices of Bengal, Madras and Bombay presidencies were amalgamated into what came to be known as Auditor General. The subsequent Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935 enhanced the position of Auditor General, whose stature and independence was equated to a judge of a Federal Court...

...Such indifference to audit queries, objections and Inspection Reports emanate from the crippling constraint that audit officers do not have powers to summon officials to depose and adjudicate, writes Mathur. He cites the example of audit of the Westland Helicopter deal (1989-'90, where for audit officials to get the files related to the deal was a herculean task. Mathur's view is that if powers analogous to a Commission of Enquiry Act were extended to the CAG, it will give it more teeth and help in carrying out its investigations...

...Although, the final outcome of public audit - CAG's audit reports – are presented in legislature for discussions and Public Accounts Committee – as well as Committee on Public Undertakings – are constituted with an express purpose of follow up on them to ensure parliamentary financial controls, the relationship of CAG and Parliament itself has remained rather ambiguous. Enough parliamentary backing hasn't come forth in event of attacks from vested interests who find the audit reports unpalatable...

The issues become complex here. Power should not be vested with a group of government institutions - dependent or independent of functions of Parliament. Monitoring agencies are also accountable. The psychology of correcting others is so dominant that we conveniently forget, and ignore the thought, to correct ourselves. This is applicable to institutions and individuals.
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Shiraz

I got to know about this movie from The Sydney Morning Herald while browsing Australian sites to know what they write about Dr. Haneef.

From New York Times:

Though of royal lineage, Selima (Enakashi Rama Rao) was an infant foundling raised by a kind potter and her adoptive brother, Shiraz (Himansu Rai). She is kidnapped and sold as a slave to Prince Khurram, who would later become Emperor Shah Jehan (Charu Roy). The prince falls for his beautiful slave girl, much to the consternation to dark-hearted schemer Dalia (Seeta Devi) who has her own plans for the prince. When Shiraz tracks down her beloved sibling, their tearful reunion ends after Shiraz is thrown in prison and sentenced to die. Only a pendant -- which proves Selima's royalty -- saves Shiraz's live. Selima marries Emperor Shah Jehan, becoming Empress Mumtaz Mahal. When she dies, the Emperor builds the Taj Mahal in her memory. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Links:

Himansu Rai
Franz Osten

Ingmar Bergman

I had watched Wild Strawberries before. A friend of mine wanted to watch it for quite sometime. Never got the time and the mood to watch. We will never know why certain things are chosen to occur in a particular way. Today we thought of watching it. No, we did not watch it fully. But we had watched for sometime. We never knew that we were paying our homage to the film-maker Ingmar Bergman.

Ingmar Bergman has passed away today at the age of 89. I have also watched The Seventh Seal.

He has said,

"Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul."

"Anyone who makes films must have a goal before his eyes: namely, to try to get as close to the viewer as possible, to affect him as deeply as possible. What i call technique is knowing exactly how to affect the viewer. That's the crux of the matter. All the rest is secondary. And it is a matter of talent.."

"I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then."

Some links:

1. BBC report
2. Bergman profile - BBC
3. Ingmar Bergman website
4. Ingmar Bergman Foundation
5. Ingmar Bergman - IMDB
6. Bergmanorama
7. Obituary - BBC
   

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Two Missions

M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, in 1997, identified two major goals for the 60th anniversary commemoration.

1. Hunger-free India on the lines proposed by Mahatma Gandhi in 1946 at Naokhali

Over 200 million children, women, and men go to bed now partially hungry. Unfortunately, an integrated strategy is yet to be put in place with the result that the goal of a hunger-free India is nowhere near accomplishment.

2. Knowledge and skill empowerment of rural families with the help of information and communication technology

While connectivity can be achieved, content creation and capacity building will be the greatest challenges. The content has to be dynamic, demand driven, locale specific, and in local languages. As a single step, the rural knowledge revolution is likely to have the largest beneficial impact on the physical, economic, and social well-being of the more than 700 million people living in villages. Poverty will persist under conditions where the human resource is under-valued and material resources are over-valued.

(From this article by M. S. Swaminathan)

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Trust

There are stories everywhere. Each story speaks to us in a personal tone. The narration and sequence of events are some of the important aspects of story-telling. Stories are built around beads of small events that are tied together. Those events may be communicated well but the thread that ties them up may not be strong. Sometimes events may look frivolous but the thread puts them in a different perspective. So possibilities are many. I am planning, plans are always planned to have a shorter life, to write short pieces on such events that have occurred in movies, novels, and short stories; events that can be taken out of the thread and can be seen as a separate bead that shows colors of emotional shades. It does not matter if events are from art or commercial movies (what an inaccurate classification), good or bad novels, cooked up or real (this is something different), etc.!!! Here we go.
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A husband creates a foundation to initiate many socially relevant projects. The foundation runs schools, colleges, and hospitals, to name a few. People are too happy to receive help from the foundation. The foundation becomes really a foundation to social changes.

But where is money coming from? Through legal or illegal means?

Investigators, Regulators, and Monitors suspect foul play. How to unearth the secrets?

Catch his wife - a soft, a law-abiding, and a law-fearing wife.

Police and others make her believe that if she could give them some proof of the foundation's source of income, then her husband could escape with mild punishment. Else?

What else? He has to pay a heavy price - his life; he is also in the hit list of many local criminals and politicians.

His wife thinks. She thinks again. She thinks again and again and again. And she decides to pass the laptop, which has all information about the source of money donated to the foundation, to investigation agencies.

Police and other government agencies come to his home to arrest him. He comes to know that his laptop has been given to them by his wife!

He could not believe it. Shocked; Shell shocked.

His parents start scolding his wife. What does he do? His future would possibly be doomed by this act of his wife. His name and fame would receive hits from all sides. What about his image? That would be smeared with black; black tar. Saving his face is the last thing he could expect.

What does he do?

Is he going to have vengeance against his wife? Is he going to scold her to start with? Is he going to mistrust? Does he feel betrayed?

He stops his parents from shouting at her and says, "If she had done this, she must have perceived that it would do some good to me. She will not do anything that would destroy me. She cannot do. Do not scold her."

Trust. This is it.

Apart from the trust he exhibits, it is his composure, that gathers energy and courage to say that 'I trust you' to his wife in such a situation, makes a good case to ponder trust, composure, courage in relationships.

(The situation is from the movie Sivaji - the Boss)

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Nutty Connections

There are many theories - scientific, philosophical, and soporific - on causes and their effects. Causality. And its effect. Can one find the link between the two? While you are thinking about all these, just read this (via) :

The (ground nut) oil prices have gained 23 per cent since the beginning of this year. The problem with groundnut oil is that mills are not getting kernel for crushing.

What is the reason? Possible and feasible reason?

One of the reasons is rise in direct consumption, including as snacks, especially for liquor consumption.

Peanuts are preferred to be eaten during consumption of liquor as they are cheaper than cashewnuts. Also, rising income levels are seeing corresponding increase in consumption of almost all products, including liquor.

My friend, who applies loads of coconut oil on his head, face, hands, etc., thinks of writing a petition to the government for a ban to use coconut in the domains other than.. other than applying on one's own body!!!

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Rejection?

Rejection is part of life.

Some of the famous rejection stories are (from here) :

1. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – 14 rejections
2. Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 18 rejections
3. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell – 38 rejections
4. From rejection slip for George Orwell's Animal Farm: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.”
5. From rejection slip for article sent to the San Francisco Examiner to Rudyard Kipling: “I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language."
6. From rejection slip for The Diary of Anne Frank: “The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the curiosity level.”