Forest dwellers and the future that awaits

The other day I was reading this article about how the Odisha government has violated some parts of the protection for 'forest dwellers' in sanctioning land for the POSCO project. And that got me thinking ... in today's world, does it make sense to protect forest dwellers by preserving their natural habitat for their living?

How long can the natives continue to depend on the forest to earn their food and shelter? Is it sustainable? At some point or other, the industrialized and mechanized world will invade their space. And if they refuse to join the main stream, what have they gained? A status in museums ? Is that the right choice for them?

Can an Adivasi continue to sell 'kendua' and 'mahula' and have a better life?

Is not it better to give new opportunities to these people so that they can gel with the modern world - and learn the rules of the mainland they live in?

I am observing the popular media make them heroes and detest corporatism and industrialization. But do these gentlemen have an answer for the next 50 years? When an average child will be spending her time exploring the world through a computer, the Adivasi girl would still be hunting for firewood to help her mom cook food. Is that what the media envision for the Adivasis?

We have to remember the old colonization days - the British rule, they came from a mechanized world and took over our ancient civilization within no time. But we in India, should not draw parallel with that about the Government of India. The government is not perfect - but it does not have policies to colonize the forests. The only way going forward for preservation of forests and protection of forest dweller's interest is to let the government take steps in bringing in money so that these can be done in a systematic way.

All Adivasis are not visionaries, and the whole government is not evil.
Media needs to co-operate with the government in educating less aware people and explain the world's rules to them. We all have a responsibility to bring them into the modern world with grace so that the people don't suffer. After all, we are a self-ruled elected set of power holders - not some east India company employees.

And for god's sake, media needs to stop glorifying the anti-industry movements in Odisha. On one side they cry about Odish'a poverty, on other side they don't let any industrialization project proceed peacefully. Do they have a solution to offer to bring Odisha out of the poverty? Selling forest-originated biological materials is not enough - we have to sell our mineral resources - but in the process, gain maximum benefit so that at some point we become self sufficient in industries so that some alien organization is not giving us only a meager percent of what we deserve in terms of economic growth from our resources.

For heaven's sake - let some big industries come up in Odisha - that is going to be our only way of coming out of the sorry state of economic affairs. Ancient ways are not enough - we compete in a modern world and we need to stand up!

Yet another powerful person, corrupted. What else did you expect anyway?

This whole IPL corruption story was so expected, that it is almost boring.
See this news article on times of india for what I am talking about.

In a country like hours, where there are hardly any honest people in power positions, whenever you see money flowing all around - it is very natural to expect that some 'locha' is going on somewhere.

When was the last time we heard that some great business idea or political initiative was done purely for the sake of business? There are always people with vested interests, who just want the best thing for themselves or their family.

It is so very tiring to hear about yet another scandal.
How much is enough, really? And when will better sense prevail in the society!

The spiderman dialogue which I like very much - 'with great power, comes great responsibilities', does not seem to have gone down into any powerful person's head.

And for Mr Tharoor, he still has a lot to learn about Indian politics. There are numerous politicians sitting in the parliament having done enough 'ghotala' and still going strong. Sad thing for Tharoor is that, he could not handle such a small ghotala and was disgraced in public. He needs to learn better politics.

And there is no hapiness in saying that yet another corrupt minister is gone - because I am quite confident that all the rest of them are even more corrupt than Mr Tharoor.

Hmmm, it is so tiring, it is so so boring. Yaaawwwn....

Bring on some more sports on field - waiting for the IPL semis and final.
Cricket is better than the political game, anyday!

The principal who had not forgotten his adolescence

Continuing with my series of teasers...
Earlier one is Rebels and Results.

--
Polished leather boots always clamped his big toes. With such force he used to walk, the whole concrete corridor would shake like a wooden platform under pressure from a battalion of soldiers. Our principal was more like an army major than an electrical engineer. He had probably forgotten his casual student days. Hari used to claim that he must have been a strict disciplinarian during his college days - just like him. Nobody had the courage to ask him that and it remains a mystery to date.


Exactly at 8.05 AM he would start in his government white ambassador car. His driver was the only driver in that small town to be dressed like a typical Hindi movie car driver. Mr Nandi insisted that he be dressed that way or lose his job. I had this feeling that the driver also enjoyed this special status even though he criticized Mr Nandi behind his back.


At 8.10 AM the white ambassador will take a turn at the main gate and at 8.18 AM the heavy boots will start their long walk from principal’s room in the corner. By the time the sound of boots faded, there will be a list of teachers who missed their first class or came late. Other teachers, the old ones, the new ones and the lazy ones hated Mr Nandi. Nobody wanted to be in their first classes holding chalks by 8.20 AM. But if you missed one class, you will be summoned to principal’s room with the knowledge of all your students. Mr Nandi would just barge into the classroom and politely request the professor to see him after the class. The whole class would have this meaningful sarcastic smile filled with pity. The teachers had no choice but to be on time.

By the way, did I tell you about this ego fight among teachers about their positions, roles and promotions?

“No dad, not now! We see that in our college even today, please skip that!” My kids screamed in unison. “Okay, okay, let me go on…”

So, I went on, about Mr Nandi, whom, personally I considered as one of the best administrators I have seen in any academic institution.

He did his engineering from an IIT, the most premier engineering institute in India. IITians took a lot of pride in their “IITian” status. So, Mr Nandi, just like any other IITian, would not lose a single chance to enforce the fact that he was superior to all his peers, not only in position, but also as an engineer. Most of our teachers secretly admired IITians and always felt lacking in their technical knowledge even though that was not true for many of them.

Anyway, it is not about the teachers fight, I will reserve that for another day.

Kids, it is about how Mr Nandi had not forgotten about his college days.
And knew exactly what the students wanted.

Nevertheless, by his disciplinary actions over time, he had acquired a notorious reputation among his peers, and admiration from us students. That is because we realized that as long as he is at the helm, the college policies can only be student friendly as he understood our pulses.

During our first year in college, all of India saw a major student movement against Mr V. P. Singh’s plan to implement “Mandal Commission” recommendations. There were many deaths, student agitations reported from almost all colleges. And we were not to be left behind.

Among our seniors was Mr S. Shravan, a no-nonsense third year student who loved to remain in touch with contemporary affairs. I suspect he had a desire to be a student leader. But in an engineering college, nobody wants student leaders.

Unless the leader could convince the college management to spend good money to bring the prints of the latest movie for private screening.

OR

The leader could convince the ladies hostel matron to keep the visiting hours longer than usual on special days like Valentine’s day or Rakshya Bandhan. Oh yes, you heard me right, Rakshya Bandhan was a special day, even for the hot blooded teenagers, for specific reasons. Let me keep your curiosity burning for some more time kids.

Coming back to student leaders, certainly, nobody wanted a leader who was serious about making a point. Those kinds of student leaders, who later would play a bigger role in state or national level politics, are not found in engineering colleges. They are found mostly in Arts or Commerce colleges. In a way, the engineering students did not bother much about the country going to the hands of useless goons – as long as they were assured good jobs and nice social status in our poor country.

The general colleges that taught less job oriented courses, play bigger roles in manufacturing powerful leaders.

Shravan would find that out in a bitter way.

His dreams of making national news on Mandal Commission would remain unfulfilled.
Bcause Mr Nandi knew exactly what the students wanted and had not forgotten the days of his adolescence.

“Come on dad, no more build up please, tell us! …”

And I was thinking where I start about Shravan’s heartbreak. I admired the guy, his focus and dedication for the bigger roles in life. And I was one among the culprits, that guilt will only burn with me on my last day.

Blog as an outlet for complaining?

I was doing some introspection on why do I like to blog.

Is it that I want to complain about something, against some system and when I write it here I feel better?

Is it that I just want people to know what I am feeling strongly about?

And why is it important to spill out my frustrations, complains, strong feelings in a blog page?

Hhmmm, I would not say any of this is the reason for my blogging.
You might see some strong feelings in my writings, but it is definitely not a vent to let out my frustrations.

For me, writing here or writing a poem is a way of expressing some thought that is crossing my mind. If the moment passes, the writing or the poem never comes about. Later, sometimes I am happy that I did not write it, but most of the times I think that some output of that thought process would have made a point. It could have made some of you see my observation or poise for a moment to ponder over the topic.

So, my introspection conclusion is that this blog is not a result of some negative moments in my life, this is a result of my urge to bring notice to some topics, which matters to me, to you and to most.

Theme of the story is, I am back to writing days ! Please do let me know through your comments if you think some topic is useless and did not manage to evoke a thought in you. Whole purpose of my expressions here is to stir some feelings inside you after observing my observation :)

Information overload

The world wide web started with hardly any useful information for the likes of an average internet user of today. It started simply as a way of communicating conveniently among the universities and science labs. See the history of WWW on Wikipedia here -> WWW .

When all types of industries, institutions and geeks started uploading information on the WWW - publishing and sharing, then came the likes of search engines Lycos/AltaVista that became popular. See the history of search engines on Wikipedia here -> Search engines .

Then came Google - which completely changed the way people browsed the internet. Instead of typing an address in the URL bar of the internet browser, they started with Google always. A lot many percentage of people still do the same.

But with the amount of information that can be browsed on the WWW these days, google search results are also overwhelming. So much so that it is becoming impossible to conclude reading on a topic, you never know how much is enough.

You search for a news piece and find millions of hits!

How do you know that which ones are worth reading, or good! Good articles are now at the mercy of the Google page rank algorithm.

Imagine the amount of difficulty a new portal will have - aggressive marketing, and ads everywhere like on TV/radio is probably the only way of boosting initial number of visitors. Even if a portal has excellent articles, tremendous value - unless millions of people hit it, it will not feature in the initial pages of Google search results. And the problem is even more glaring is the portal deals with generic topics.

Probably the next step in search is a question-answering kind of system, that can search within the Google search results to pull out useful results. And they will introduce their own ranking algorithms...

With so much information on the WWW these days - if you are a student or an upcoming professional - you are clueless about how much information is enough, and you can never be sure that you did not miss out on some valuable information. It is just impractical to find the best category by browsing through search engines.

It is tiring, it is endless.

These days I find Wikipedia as the best source of information to know about anything, and have stopped browsing through Google now. I search on Wikipedia, browse known and trusted news portals like Nytimes/BBC/CNN/Timesofindia/Hindu, and be done with it for most of my reading on the internet.

I know there are millions of web pages sitting out there with valuable information about so many things I would benefit from. But have to live with the incompleteness.

May be soon Google will not be the starting point of net browsing any more, people will go back to typing the URL address on the internet browser :)

Unless..... somebody comes up with search templates, where you can fill values based on which you want to search - and generic fields which google/yahoo/bing all understand and give you results accordingly. Then the ranking algorithm is yours - the user's. And there can be default set of values for users who don't care either way.

Or

Unless.....somebody comes up with the big daddy of Google using some magic... :)

Until then... so long ...

Loads of friends

Thy who hath friends, has learnt the art of living... - anonymous

Friends on Orkut, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Random sites (rediff.com, indiatimes.com, bigadda.com whatever), on iGoogle (Google just launched social network applications on iGoogle - check it out if you have not so far), MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, GTalk, Skype, Yaari, on X, on Y, on Z... hhhmmmm ....

Loads and loads of friends everywhere - through every portal.
Have you learnt the art of living?

From savvy at 10.15 AM: Running for a meeting...
From savvy at 10.30 AM: Getting bored in the meeting
From savvy at 11.00 AM: God, finally it is over!
From savvy at 11.15 AM: Need coffee after that boring meeting
From savvy at 11.30 AM: Dreaming about lunch already
From savvy at 12.30 PM: Wow, I am in the coolest restaurant in the city!
...
blah
blah
blah

Okay, okay, point taken - you want to know how your friends are doing, and what they are up to. But these? Running commentary of daily activities? Would you opt for that?

You care a lot about your friends and would love to know what they are up to.
But certainly, a continuously tweeting friend is not cool at all :)

Gone are the days when there were mails from friends written thoughtfully, about their happenings, their feelings, their thoughts and how they are going on about their life in general. - Those were fun to read, brought a smile on your face.

Gone are the days when a friend would call up sometime to ask let us meet over lunch or snacks to catch up. Those were the coolest restaurants around the city, even with the most careless cook.

Can you imagine what happens if all your friends start tweeting/scrapping/walling/poking you at the pace as in my example?

Friends are one of the best things about life, you love their updates tweets/pokes/scraps/mails/phones/meeting-over-lunches ...

And then, there are people who are literally loading the communication portals :) They are still the same friends you care about, but they all seem distant when you have to opt for 'don't show updates from this person' because of the communication overload.

Happy tweeting/scrapping/messaging/e-mailing ... whatever ... !

To whichever country you go, have the fruits of that country

In Odia, there is a popular saying "je deshe jaai, se phala khaai" - which means, to which ever country you go, eat the fruits of that country. One way it is logical, that you don't have to import/export a lot of things required for your daily living, is not it ? :)

Now that I am based in the USA for sometime, it makes all the sense to try eating the fruits here - and yes, for somebody like me who grew up in a far away place from the north India regions where fruits are in abundance, oh boy, happy I am to see all the different types of juicy and fresh fruits here! I believe, if I don't eat lot of fruits in USA, it is kind of an insult to being here!

Keeping the literal meaning aside, if you think about the proverb, it actually means that just gel with the local culture. USA is one of the best places on earth to gel - it welcomes all kinds of people, from all over the world, and being the richest country, it attracts so many foreigners for work. In India, I never saw so many non-indians, like the way I am seeing non-americans in america. It is definitely a much much more favourite destination to stay, and not just to visit.

However, to me, it looks like people from different cultures and ethnicity tend to form their own close groups as social circle. It might be kind of an identity crisis, an urge to hold on to your own culture as much as possible - just to have that "I am still close to home" feeling. For example, indians who would have ignored some festivals while living in India, tend to being particular about celebrating those when in USA. I wonder why that urge ... I mean, holding on to one's own culture is fine, but doing that out of a 'otherwise I am lost' feeling is not exactly healthy I guess. Over time, you are a bunch of 'desis' who just move around with desis, and even if they stay here for like 20/30 years, their complete friend circle is only desis ...

Hmmm ... may be that is a good thing to do in the long run, at least you are not exactly lost, but hold on, is it true? You are lost in India also when you go back after 30 years, and you are lost here as you never attempt to gel into the society...

It is just my observation until now, but may be this is the reason why the next generation grow up into becoming ABCDs - I wonder what happens in the second generation!

Anyway, I am also trying to have the fruits of this country, and stay close to the desi culture as well :)