The Great Khali

There are some success stories which are not mainstream in the Indian sense, but still quite remarkable. Narain Karthikeyan is one such story. Just a tiny fraction of the country's population knows what Formula 1 racing is. And yet an Indian managed to break into the rarefied echelons of this sport. Granted, he didn't exactly strike fear in the heart of Fernando Alonso, but just making it to an F1 team is remarkable.

There is another Indian success story of sorts brewing in the United States. It is not in the field of sports per se, but sports entertainment, i.e WWE (professional wrestling). Dalip Singh has made his WWE debut. He used to be a daily wage labourer in Punjab. That's right, he used to work on highways, breaking stones. He was later recruited into the Punjab Police Department, worked on his physique, won the Mr. India bodybuilding contest, and joined the Pro Wrestling circuit in Japan. He has rapidly moved up the Pro Wrestling Chain and has ended up at the WWE, the top most body of pro-wrestling.

Not only has he entered the WWE, but he's done so with a bang, debuting in a feud with the legendary wrestler 'The Undertaker'. Most wrestlers move up the hard way, by feuding with smaller stars, and as their popularity grows, they move higher and higher in the value chain, so to say. But once in a while, if a special "talent" comes along, with a potential to make a splash, he is pitchforked into the big league.

Whether Dalip Singh, who has been named 'The Great Khali', can actually stay in the big league and become a big star remains to be seen. Wish him the very best...

Quotable Quotas

It is April, elections are around the corner. Bingo! The vote-starved politicians of India has found another cheap, controversial trick to diffuse the focus of the voters from their crimes and inefficiencies. This time it is the reservations or quotas which were supposedly for eliminating the indifference and inequality between the upper caste and backward caste.

Long way back, education was reserved for only the forward caste and the backward caste were denied education and were meant to be only servants/slaves. Things changed, India became free, caste system is gone and it is the 21st century. To give an initial push to the unfortunate poor backward Indian citizens, the government at those days introduced the reservation system. It infixed a new life into them, thus uplifting their social status, self-value and self-confidence. Decades passed, the second and even third generation has come. There is now an upper class in the backward class and the reservations has created a backward class in the upper class. Now there isn’t any cast based discrimination anywhere. Any body can go learn or earn; only limited by their own ambitions and skills. Now if at all, if there is any discrimination, it is by the government and which is induced into the society as an upshot of it. The backward castes are looked upon so in colleges just because they stole some seats by force. The government supports them from school to job. The people who are availing the reservations now mostly are from well-off families, with both the parents having a decent government job, which again was got thru some reservation. Some states currently have upto 70% reservations. Perhaps you can now understand why most of people who can afford go abroad for education and eventually settle there (the brain drain)…huh!

Reservations were good, and still are good for the needy. Since all the citizens are now equally eligible for education, the only criteria for reservation should be their financial status and not caste. Again reservations should be intelligently prorated so that the normal citizens also get their just share to live well. Currently what the reservations mostly do is creating a lazy, rich and arrogant backward class, filled with inferiority complex. Sometimes they miss the respect they deserve as their success and achievements are attributed to their reservation by the society.

I sincerely feel the reservations and financial assistance needs to be there only for basic education. It must not be extended to professional education or higher education like IIM, Medicine, Engineering etc. There is a Chinese proverb that “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. So instead of fooling the people by such gimmicks, the government should rather improve the standard of the schools and other institutions run by the them, thus making sure that the poor (and not based on caste) also gets an education at par with the private ‘public schools’ which has astronomical tuition and other capitation fees. And a request to all those educated citizens who thinks the country will never change – cast your votes and make a difference, than leaving the decision to the 50% poor uneducated voting m'asses' who are left to decide the fate of the next emerging super power country!

I think reservations should be there in politics too ;-)

That thing called Love!

“It's not all hearts and flowers. Romantic love, that feeling of euphoria we expect in the West, is a lower priority among some in places such as India and Taiwan.”

Happen to come across an article in Nat Geo Mag (Feb 06). It talks about the experiences of Photographer Jodi Cobb, who scoured the globe to document how people define love and how it fits into their lives. Her findings were interesting!

Love is divided into three segments - lust, romantic obsession and attachment. Lust: One of the main things that men like about women is their waist to hip ratio, desirable ratio being 6.7. Women are attracted to men with broad shoulders and rugged features. Romantic obsession: It involves many chemicals. It was found that after four years, the couple either separate or stay together in a long term relationship. Attachment: It is a different chemical in brain and causes people to feel very calm and sooth.

In India first comes marriage and then love. Centuries of experience says that romantic obsession dies out with time and hence they prefer arranged marriages. In china, grooms from Taiwan will come and does 10 minute interviews for a bunch of Chinese brides and finally selects one and marries her on the third day. The Taiwanese men prefer Chinese women since they find the Taiwanese women too aggressive and assertive since they have job and all. Japan is in a social crisis. They have the lowest birth rate, highest age of marriage and women increasingly hesitate to marry. Middle aged women dress up as Lolitas and refuse to accept the responsibilities of their age.

In west, people truly believe in love and romance. No body marries a stranger on the third day after seeing for the first time. But still they have more than 50% divorce rate. But again, looking from a different angle, perhaps the divorce rates are more because the women has the freedom to do so and the society still accepts them! Bottom line, it is not a smooth sail after all...

Find more info here:

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0602/feature2/index.html

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0602/feature2/gallery1.html

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0602/feature2/multimedia.html

Jessica Lal was killed twice!

Yes, Jessica was killed twice... once in 1999 by the accused Siddharth Vasisht alias Manu Sharma, and now again in 2006 by the Indian Judiciary. The accused is the son of former federal minister, Vinod Sharma. He is alleged to have shot dead model Jessica Lal, who was working as a bartender at a well-known restaurant, Tamarind Court. She had refused to serve him a drink after midnight (0200 hours on Friday, April 30 1999) - something which is prohibited by licensing laws. So the rich, powerful, arrogant and spoilt ‘ministerial son’ paid her farewell good-bye with his gun (unlicensed!). The court ‘had’ charged mainly the following Manu Sharma, Vikas Yadav, Manu's uncle Shyam Sundar Sharma, Amardeep Singh Gill and Alok Khanna, both former executives of a multinational soft drinks company, cricketer Yuvraj Singh's father Yograj Singh, Harvinder Chopra, Vikas Gill and Raja Chopra.

But, questions are being raised about the motive for the murder. It is being said that Jessica was to accompany Manu Sharma and backed out. Why she was supposed to go out with him or backed out is not known.

But this sensational case was subdued after 7 years and all the alleged were acquitted. Talking to reporters after pronouncing the judgment, Additional Sessions Judge S. L. Bhayana said: "The court has acquitted them because the Delhi police failed to sustain the grounds on which they had built up their case.'' Quite a convincing reason!! "The police failed to recover the weapon which was used to fire at Jessica Lal as well as prove their theory that the two cartridges, emptied shells of which were recovered from the spot, were fired from one weapon,'' the Judge added. Hmm.. so these are loop holes in the law or tampering the evidence??! Well, may be judiciary is not smart enough to cope up with hostile witnesses and contradictory evidences!

Jessica, according to the police, was taken to a hospital in Safdurjung Enclave. She was later declared dead at the Apollo Hospital. The All India Institute of Medical Science conducted her post-mortem. Her friends describe her as bubbly, vivacious and full of life. Let us see whether she is lucky enough to get justice! Whatever she was, I don’t think she deserved such a merciless death!

http://www.rediff.com/news/jessica.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Lal

Fight for Jessica Lal:

Join NDTV's campaign of support for Jessica Lal's family. Send SMS JESSICA to 6388. Each SMS will help the petition for a fresh trial. NDTV will take the petition to President APJ Abdul Kalam.

Tourism Plus IT = Kerala

Taking a cue from the success of Bangalore, Gurgaon and Hyderabad as some of the hot IT destinations in India, the green state of Kerala is all set to follow suit. Recently, at the major IT event, IT Kerala 2006, nearly a hundred IT and IteS sector companies converged to display their products and services, and to discuss business and investment plans to bring about this progress. These included TCS, Intel, Infosys, L&T, Tulip IT Services, NeST, IBS, Oracle, Intel, Microsoft, Bharati, Reliance, Sutherland, HP, Dell, 24/7 Customer Care, Rittal India and many more companies.

IT Secretary, P H. Kurien informed that the Kerala government would position Kottayam, Thrissur, Kannur and Kozhikode as satellite IT destinations in the state, since present IT activities were presently concentrated around Thiruvananthapuram - the state capital, and Kochi. Major business plans, expansions and investments were also announced at the four-day event. Infosys announced its intention to invest Rs1.5 billion in three phases and raise the headcount in Kerala by 3750 people. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), will be investing Rs2.5 billion to set up a software development center at the Technopark campus to upgrade its existing training facility there and provide jobs for 5,000 software professionals. The U.S. based BPO firm Sutherland Global Services has plans to invest over Rs120 crore to create service delivery center and training infrastructure on 20 acres of land in Kochi. The company expects to hire 3,000 professionals over the next three years in the first phase for its Kerala operations.

Good to see that Gods own country is finally diverting into other sectors also, than just tourism! Also probably more Gods own people and work in home place, close to thier near and dear ones...

CRY... will you wipe my tears?

Imagine having to pull your son out of school to send him to work in a dim-lit, dusty sweatshop, just because you are unable to find a job that pays enough to support your family. Imagine your daughter having to drop out of school just because it has no toilets. Imagine your new-born baby dying because your village has no doctors to treat her fever. Imagine your children growing up stunted because of lack of adequate nutrition. Imagine entire generations of your family being born into bonded labor, with no hope of breaking free. Well, you are fortunate and thank god that it doesn’t happen to you. But all are not as lucky as we are. So when they cry, CRY tries to wipe their tears, at least of some, if not all...

CRY stands for Child Relief and You, a movement for the rights of every child. It is a leading Indian non-government organisation (NGO) that works towards restoring basic rights to children in India. CRY believes that children – ALL children, everywhere - are individuals… NOT possessions of their parents or the state, NOT objects of charity, however well-intentioned. CRY believes that they are citizens in their own right, the future of their countries and the world, entitled to the full spectrum of human rights. Our focus is on the 4 basic rights of children. These were defined in 1989, by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international human rights treaty to which 191 countries, including India, are signatories.

• the right to survival - to life, health, nutrition, name and nationality
• the right to development - to education, care, leisure, recreation
• the right to protection - from exploitation, abuse, neglect
• the right to participation - to expression, information, thought and religion

CRY was started by seven young people in December 1978. CRY has learned over 26 years that ensuring these in a long-term and sustainable manner is only possible when we empower communities to address the root causes of illiteracy, poverty, discrimination and exploitation. CRY has realised that child rights cannot be ensured unless families have their livelihoods assured.

Join CRY in creating a world in which child rights for ALL children are not negotiable. Perhaps you can wipe the tears of an innocent little girl for an year with the money you spent on burgers and movies for a couple of days. You may sponsor a child, or at least his/her education or perhaps buy some merchandise, and light someone's face with a smile, than tears. Someone said "Everything you give out, comes back to you, some day, some way".

Read me: http://www.cry.org/

Trivia about Life

The average human life in today's world is around 60 years. If you analyse the break-up of activities associated with these 60 years of our life, you can see that it more or less matches with the following:

12 Years in Working

22 Years in Sleeping

04 Years in Routine Travelling

05 Years in Eating

03 Years in Bathing, Dressing etc...

06 Years in Useless Chatting, Gossip

04 Years in Sickness & Illness

Balance ? Only 4 Years

Why should mankind think, involve in activities that result in sufferings, terror, hatred, fighting, killings etc... in the short span of 4 years left to us. It needs to be utilized in a better way by doing all good things, helping others and thanking God for the opportunity given to us in being a human being...

Live and Let Live!

Crime busters unfold!

You thought the police were all some rough and tough guys, who see and deal everyone like criminals? Well, think again! They are as good as us, or perhaps better. They might be a nightmare for the criminals, but for the normal people they are the friendly neighbourhood heroes who let us live in peace. But again, if you thought all they do (or can do) is only hitting and shouting, you are wrong again. I know an IPS officer from Kerala who is very much into music. He has come up with some devotional albums and even did background score for couple of films. Yeah, you guessed it right; it is none other than the famous Tomin J. Thachankery IPS. While wandering in the blogspot, I came across another smart guy, who really deserves a standing ovation. This is another brilliant IPS officer from Karnataka, who even in his busy and tiring crime fighting schedules, managed to put together an excellent blog with information about what the real police is and what they are up to (most of us have conceived notions from those stupid films). It is B. Dayananda IPS, Superintendent of Police, Dakshina Kannada District. Here is the link (much awaited) to his blog - http://www.spdk.blogspot.com/

Hats off to you Mr. Dayananda…!!

If you go to Kerala, this might help:
http://kerala.gov.in/dept_home/list.htm