Man of the Year 2009:Aam Aadmi

For no longer being taken for granted .For changing how politics is done .For making his concerns India's concerns .For wanting change and getting it,he's our man.
He was never not in the picture .Which is not the same thing as saying that he was always in the picture.
Like much else that's conciously left half -baked ,the Aam Aadmi --literslly the common man but far from being the middle class tea-from -a-cup sipping ,newspaper -reading Common Man of R.K.Laxman --has been many things for many people.For the politician doubling as a social engineering he was an inverted deity created in his own image .For the rest of us,he was a jumble of people of people who mwere People Not Like Us who existed in photographs of polling booth queus every election ,and fodder for op-ed page writers ,development economists and politicians at rallies all keeen to show that they understand "Real India".
The Aam Aadmi was a concept .That is till 2009.

2010:year of the consumer

Yahoo ! gets personal
Yahoo ! wants to be the center of what consumers do everyday, giving them the means to be everything they want to be . " We want to be add the center of people's online lives, " says Yahoo! India's MD Arun Tadanki. What that means is your ability to customise the home page the way he wants to and access any website, including competing ones, without having to get out of the Yahoo ! home page.
Yahoo! has been among the most proactive brands to bring the consumer in to define it. The ongoing 'It's You' ad compaign is the culmination of the brand's decision to be just what the consumer wants it to be for him or her.

2010:Year of the consumer

2010:Year of the consumer

Web Feats

Internet has made a practical impact on us in the past few years.And there's no going!

Everybody can get information if they learn how to look for it
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Irritated by the half-remembered lyrics of a song ?Chettinad fried chicken in a hurry ?Want the price of Infosys shares?
In pre-Internet days ,finding answers would have involved looking through reference books ,scanning a newspaper or even making a trip to the library--all with no gurantee of finding the factual nugget .Now ,Google,the Internet search engine ,can deliver even the most obscure bits of information to your desktop computer within a matter of seconds.

Everyone can get breaking news
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You can read daily newspapers from just about any part of the globe online.Try thepaperboy.com for a list of papers from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.Google's news service is pretty neat,too,and even more useful is a new service that allows you to specify words of interest.When a news story on that topic pops anywhere in the world ,Google will email you the link.Look it up at www.google.com/alerts.

Everyone can be an expert
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If you're halfway competent at using the most the net as a research tool ,you're in a great position to get morte from your doctor , lawyer or banker--in fact ,anyone providing a cervice .If you use a credible website ,like webmd.com or mayoclinic.com,you can visit your doctors armed with well-informed questions about a condition and a good idea of tratment options.

Cheap,near-instant communication
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To those who have grown up in the era of the ubiquitous @symbol ,it's easy to trake e-mail for granted ,but the ability to flash messages around the globe with documents ,images or applications attached is revolutionary.Of course ,with e-mail you cannot ignore the pernicious activities of the spammers and the inconvenience of having an inbox flooded with offers of cheap drugs and penis-enlargement techniques.

The bank on your desktop
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Plenty of retail businesses have tried to harness online power to amke their services cheaper and easier to use ,but it is in the banking sphere that the effect has been astounding.When banks started providing online services we were initially impressed that we could check our account ballances online.

Everyone can be a publisher
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OK ,the Internet is not going to turn you into Rupert Murdoch overnight,but the ability for everyone to publish their thoughts online is atremendous change.Publishing used to be concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy people and organizations that could afford the expensive infrastructure to print and distribute newspapers ,magazines or books.Now everyone can do so for free through personal websites or,more likely these days ,by joining the blogging phenomenon ( blog is a new word derived from web log).Try blogger.com(wow ! I'm also using thier space now to reach you all)or geeklog.net for a taste of blog power or even to set up your own.How you make people read your blog is a different question.

The world market comes to your doorstep
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The Internet has now turned the connected world into one huge marketplace.This is primarily through the online monolith eBay (or its local counterpart baazee.com)but there are many others --Google lists hundreds of different auction sites.These sites have evolved into an incredibly efficient marketplace.

Music
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Driven initially by the conventional Napster and other peer-to-peer systems ,the Internet has revolutionised the distribution of music.Taking up running now is Apple's iTunes ,which sold more than 70 million songs in its first year alone.

No-one is anonymous any more
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Try a search on your best friends' names in Google and chances are they will be on the Internet ,especially if they are under30.

Copenhagen---Its end result

Climate changes ,people don't
It was where humankind met to try and save the home planet , but the talk of redemption soon degenerted into a babel of voices .
On a dark north European December morning ,under the warm , yellow glow of street lights ,a silent snow fell on the stream of cyclists hurrying to work , study and shop .It was -1 degree C ,but that never stopped a people determined to be fit , hapy and ready for a warmer Earth.
About a third of all commuters in Copenhagen use a cycle . It isn't very hard .Almost every road has a clearly marked cycle lane ,and cyclists get preference over motorised traffic.These energetic commuters keep their endorphins charged ,and makes the inhabitants of the capital of the Kingdom of Denmark kinder and gentler than most.Some surveys say they are among the happiest people on earth ( The Bhutanese might dispute that ).

The SMILE has to go

SPS Rathore has been let off in the Ruchika Girhotra case .When law-keepers subvert the system,they must get dbouble the punishment.

Ruchika and her friend Aradhana were tyennis buffs.The teanage girls had just seen a SteffiGraf-Monica Seles face -off on TV and were itching to ape the serves and volleys .Rathore ,then an Inspector -General of Police (IG )and also the head of the Haryana Lawn Tennis Association ,summoned Ruchika into his office ,and then began groping and pawing her .Aradhana walked into the room just in time for Ruchika to inentangle herself.
Ruchik's father has a bone-chillig question .If the FIR had been registered on time ,would Ruchika still have been alive today?
The verdict --that has come 19 years to take--is a joke.The judge talks about factoring in the "length of the trial and the age of the verdict" while explaining his six-month sentence .Did he forget Ruchika's age ?It's bewildering why the judge did not even deliver the two-year sentence that is the maximum punishment for molestation .
When I saw Rathore strutting out of court smiling last week ,I feel sick in my stomach .More so ,when Isaw his wife by his side ,wearing the same expression of smugness.Theirt daughter must be Ruchika's age .Would they be smiling if she had been molested by a sick,old ,powerful man?
ThaT SMILE HAS TO GO .aND WE HAVE TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.

BASIC instincts

India tried to redefine its status in Copenhagen by aligning with emerging economies . But do we actually belong to this group.
These four countries are certainly going to be powers to reckon with in the future ,in part due to their large population and natural resources.
Mumbai is surely one of the richest cities in India :if 55 per cent of its 16million population lives in slums ,they are obviously belo the poverty line is not being able to afford decent housing ,one of three essentials{roti,kapda aur makaan}

How China stole the Copenhagen show

China ,backed at times by India , then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered

China'sstrategy
* Block the open negotiations for two weeks ,and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again.
*And sure enough , the aid agencies ,civil ,civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait.
*All very predictable , but the complete , but the complete opposite of the truth .Obama was fighting desperately to salvage a deal ,but the Chinese delegation said "no",over and over again.
*China gutted the deal behind the scenes ,and then left its proxies to salvage it in public.

Hole in the Wall:A Computer Project

NIIT had initially given the project a more scientific-sounding name,"Minimally Invasive Education",but it was a newspaper article that first christened it Hole in the Wall,recalls NIIT Chairman Rajendra S.Pawar.Mitra and his colleagues set up further Holes in the Wall in the town of Shivpuri,Madhya Pradesh,and the village of Madansuti,Uttar Pradesh,where the children spoke no English at all.Our children can't even plough a field ,"said the village's adults."How are they going to use this English machine?"--a reference to the fact that no search engine operated in Hindi.
HIWs in countries such as Cambodia,Uganda,Mozambiqueand Nigeria,gifted by the Government of India,have also been a success.
The Hole in the Wall has won dr.sugata Mitra and NIIT many awards , includingDigitalOpportunity Awardat the World Congress on Information Technology,2008.And ,though administered by NIIT,it takes up much of Mitra's time.But he has never made any money from it.

The BASIC principles

Copenhagen has settled who and what matters in global carbon diplomacy

Whether the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was a disaster or an accomplishment largely depended on one's exectatins . Anyone who listened to the statements of the negotiators from the emerging economies would have judjed the chances of a global , legally-binding commitment to reduce carbon emissions as near zero. Anyone who listened to those of the developed world would have presumed it was just a matter of some hard talk and a bit of give and take.As it happened , it was a quartet comprisng India, China,Brazil, South Africa that proved to have the deciding vote. And it was with these so-called BASIC countries that the United States decided it had to come to terms with --leaving the European Union , Japan , and the rest of the Group of 77--on the sidelines.
Copenhagen helped sort out who really matters in climate change dilomacy , something of great imotr the cacophony of voices at the summit. Once one looks at the impromptu meeting that the US held with the BASIC countries tries it also becomes clear why a comprehensive agreement was not possible.The differences between the US and these countries were not rhetorical cracks : they were yawning gulfs.The US wanted to scrap the principles of the Kyoto Protocol , including existing Western commitments on carbon cuts, the idea that the rich and emerging nations could not be blamed equally for global warming , and letting the issue of comensation dissipate.The emerging economies saw all these as bedrock principles .For them ,Kyoto was the launching pad , not a temporary gantry crane that would fall aside.The stakes for all these countries --not merely environmental but also in terms of future economic growth--were so high that they proved difficult to divide the group.
Copenhagen has also sorted what matters .Even this was not clear beforehand.Those who hoped that sounding the alarm over climate change would stampede diplomacy were thwarted. The emerging economies well understood that a green adjustment would be beneficial but also carry an enormous price tag.How to share this cost is what the next several rounds of negotiations will have to focus on .India has s iuccessfully ensured that the broad agenda of the future talks are to its liking.It will now have to ensure that as the details fill out , they will assist its public intention to follow a low-carbon growth path in a way that minimises its domestic costs and maximises international benefits.
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dear readers:may I share a good news about this blog (vividha.blogspot.com).This blog appreciated in an article by Balendu Dadhich:Group Editor --www.prabhasakshi.com and himself a Hindi blogger --www.wahmedia.blogspot.com .His website:www.localisationlabs.com. Moreover he was adjudged by Microsoft as Microsot Most Valuable Professional2007.
This article's short url:www.acu.edu.au/106241
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The Creative Engineer

We engineers are often accused of being uncreative. In fact , many non-engineers would say that the phrase creative engineer is an oxymoron . Why is that , since much of engineering is inherently creative?If weren't inventive , hw could we ever develop new technologies and adapt emerging scientific principles to solve problems? That said , not all the workm we do is done creatively . We can be more creative; the question is how to unlock your creativity to improve the quality of yur ideas .

downloading the sky

the year is 2007 and I'm sitting at home drinking a cup of tea and observing a galaxy millioins of light-year away . No I don't have a fortune in cutting edge astronomical instruments, just a personal computer and reasonably fast internet connection.
Scattered across the screen is a handful of images, each showing that same galaxy but a different wavelength. The visible- light image a 5-year old photo from the twinKeck telescope on mauna kea in Hawaii show the classic galactic pinwheel, spiral arms-twisting out from a dense, starry center .In the infra-red image captured just a few seconds above by a mountain-top telescope inArizona, the galaxy looks more like a series of concentric rings, the telltale signs of dust -filled regions where stars are born.A radio image from a space , based telescope also shows a bright ring, but in this case it signifies the energy thrown of by ossby countless exploding stars. Seen in theX-ray portion of the spectrum, the galaxyies ' rings are completely lost , replaced by a bright central core probably a black hole.
As I SUPERIMPOSE THE DIFFERENT IMAGES i SPORT SOMETHINGpeculiar : A faint , curved wisp of infra-red gas next to a bright x-ray star. Zooming in, I realize that the shock wave from supernova explosion has smashed into a gas cloud and triggered the formation of a batch of babystar. My fingers tremble as a dash off a message to order up a new set of images...It's all a dream now . Unfortunately. when I pore over data on my computer nowa days , even at work, Isee the same information I've been chewing over for week or weeks or months. Now instant access to new data , now effortless comparing of multiple views of the universe through all those other images may exist in the public domain, they "restore away in vast data basesat research institutions around the world, locked up in computer that speak different languages,use different data-storage formats and even identify the same celestial bodies by different names getting those images takes days or weeks of fiddling and analysis -no astronomer can pull all those streams of data together in a easy way.

Soon , though, we'll be able to . An international collaboration the astronomers and computer scintists is now piecing together the means to connect all those dispersed stores of data-many trillions of bytes'worth ,collected over the last several decades by hundereds of ground-based and orbiting observatories in thousands of archives.their efforts will create , in effect ,the world's biggest and best telescope .known as the Virtual Obesrvatory , or VO,it will allow astonomers,as well as students and the general public,to easily locate and download research data over the internet.

Copenhagen collapsing

Copenhagen collapsing

It's now almost clear that the Copenhagen climate change conference will not result in an agreement .Denmark has indicated categorically that commitments by developed countries for the second commitment period beginning 2013 will not be arrived at Copenhagen.Worse still , there are clear signs of an attempted subversion of the multilateral system that has governed climate change negotiations over the last seventeen years there are signs of an effort to kill of the Kyoto protocol , which requires developing countries to take on legally binding emission cuts.

Writing seems to be on the wall that the Kyoto protocol is in intensive care if not dead . What it needs now is a number of oxygen cylinders one of which is in the White House, minister of state for environment Jiram Ramesh said ,"We did not come here to kill the Kyoto Protocol.

Last week,US Special Envoy for Climate Change to Todd Stem had made it clear that the US would not become part of the Kyoto Protocol nor would it agree to "to do something that's Kyoto with another name ."On Thursday Mr. Sterm reiterated this position.There are provisions from the Kyoyo} emission trading sions and clean development mechanism] that we would be very fomfortable with but in terms of an overall Kyoto architecture , no', he said.