This post does not deserve a title

Man exams are about one months away elections in the college are over some excitement has died down the cultural feasts are gaining to be over then only the festive atmosphere will go and students will start preparing for me I am away from singing and dancing,except at the background and will start preparations guess what,technology was at the final process of this election voters voted not manually but electronically. But as usual all were not satisfied with many complaining that the casting of votes was not done in an appropriate manner.

A great book

Just finished reading "A Diary of Anne Frank".A completel;y mindblowing book.The real life story of the Dutch Jewish girl who stayed in hiding for almost two years before being captured.I had been meaning to read this for a very long time.Reading it it is hard to believe that a 14 year old girl can write with so much maturity and candor.She describes how the refugees tried to keep up a facade of normality by celebrating holidays of each member and resuming their studies.The minute details of family diagreements,jealousies,the problems of lack of privacy,siblinf rivalry with her elder sister and even her approaching adolesence are discussed with an almost brutal honesty.The Nazis have, in my opinion,by killing her has robbed us of a promising writer.

Democracy in action

For the past few weeks there has been a lot of excitement in the college campus.The reason for this is the upcoming student body elections.In these elections the posts of general secretary,cultural secretary and various other office-bearers of thre college student are elected.Compared to elections of student bodies at places like Delhi University where the stakes are extremely high and political parties through their student wings piut up candidates and spend hundreds of thousands of rupees and student leaders enjoy enormous clout,ours is pretty low key.The general secretary has only limited powers.He can give only suggestions,the decision to accept them rests entirely with the authorities.But this lack of powers has not acted as a disincentive.Currently there are three contenders for the top job and hectic campaigning is going on.Promises are freely made,regardless of the fact that some promises,with the limited powers that go with the post would not be possible to fulfill.Charges and counter charges are being whispered in tight groups of students at the canteens,college gates,the roadside stalls outside the gates and at the hostels,to mention a few places.Ours being a college in which every state has a particular quota of students,students of every state vote en masse for a particular candidate and try to convince their juniors coming from that particular state to vote for the "official" candidate.And the
juniors usually acquise to the request.So the candidates try to get as many states in their pocket as possible.Being engineering students the candidates have also used technology to campaign by creating communities at community websites like orkut to drum up further support. Along with the elections to to the post of general secretary ,elections for class representative for each class are also being held.These elections are taken just as seriously.And during these days we find the idea of siiting in our classes and listening to some droning lecturer a tad more boring.

And you might now ask me with which camp my sympathies lies or how much campaigning have I done.And my answer would be zilch.My answer might offend some democratically minded folks but I prefer watching the show from the sidelines.After all the show,being the small brother of the great Indian Game called Democracy has many amusing moments.And I could certainly use a good laugh.

Assam........a raped land

Today I want to speak about something that is vey close to my heart.My homestate Assam is one of the most beautiful places in India.Today the future of Assam is at crossroads.To understand how this sorry state of affairs came about,we have to go back to the change of East Pakistan to Bangladesh.Assam is one of the Indian states bordering Bangladesh.Before the birth of Bangladesh,there was some illegal migration migration by minority hindus fleeing religious persecution in Islamic Pakistan.But it was insignificant.After the liberation of Bangladesh by India in 1971,the rate of immigration increased.This time the reasons were not religious but economic.At that time Assam was sparsely populated and heavily forested.So the aliens moved in, cutting down forests and taking up farming and fishing.

As the years rolled by the local people began to view the situation with increasing apprehension.Assamese society was a melting pot of many tribes,each with their own unique culture and coexisting peacefully for cenruries.There was no telling what the presence of increasing number of Bangladeshis,who had nothing in common with the local people would do a society which did not witness any communal riots during India's partition .There was no certainty that fifty years down the line,the locals would be swamped by aliens in their own land.And that sort of feeling is going to make everybody nervous.

At that time the main political party was the Congress(I).But there was no articulate Assamese Congress workers-only a bunch of impotent toadies whose only aim in life was to grovel before Indira Gandhi.And one of them is (dis)credited with making the (in)famous comment "India is Indira and Indira is India".So these sychophants did not draw any attention to this acute problem.Gandhi also cared two hoots for small states like Assam which had only 14 Parliamenterians.In fact the Congress viewed the migrants as apliable vote bank.Their names were inserted in the voter rolls,giving them a status of Indian citizens.Its worst fears confirmed,the Assamese society launched a mass movement headed by students whose aim was to drive the illegals out.After six bloody years Rajiv Gandhi signed an accord with the agitattiponists.But the promises wer never implemented.Politics and red tape,coupled with a stupid legislation valid only in Assam that made the onus of proving the nationality of the accused on the complainant hampered deportation.The Indian home minister admitted that there was about 20 million Bangladeshis in India and a significant chunk in Assam.

After a long process of convulted litigation,the Supreme Court struck down the offending piece of legislation,raising hopes that the deportation process would become easier.Some border districts were already Muslim majority and the rate of increase of population was more than the all India rate.This was an ominous pointer of things to come.Meanwhile the congress govt in Assam,clearly worried about its prospects in the upcoming elections some 10 months hence due to the possible disruption of its votebank looked to the central government,also led by the congress to help.And they obliged by amending the Citizenship Act 1955 so that the children of the illegal aliens who came till 2004 would be given citizenship.Effectively this meant that the cutoff date for the granting of citizenship which was 1971 as agreed on Assam Accord is now pushed to 2004,making a very serious problem more so.And this is likely to warm the cockles of the hearts of all congressmen in Assam.A special mention should also be made for Rockybul Hussain,the state home minister an allegedly an illegal migrant.He must surely be heaving sighs of relief .But there has to be change of course or the landscape of Assam will change forever.

Orkutomania

Hello everybody.I'm sorry I could not post anything earlier.I guess the reason is just plain laziness.Anyway i've been meaning to write something about a new web based service which has created a lot of sensation.I guess most of you have heard about a website named orkut.For the uninitiated it is a sort of invitation based network where you invite your friends and acquaintances and also get known to their friends as well.A great way to make friends.With a very limited number of primary contacts you can have a very large number of contacts.This is how it works.-you have 10 contacts,each of them has 10 more with whom you have the choice to make friends and contacts and the chain goes on and on.Take my case.I have only 35 friends currently in my account but am connected to precisely 9577488 people through them!!!!How's that for networking,huh?Yet another unique feature are communities.A community is simply a group of people who share similar interests.And the communities can be anything about sushi to sex.Visit the site.You might just find an old friend,or an old flame.Or it might be the blossoming of a new relationship.

As I had earlier mentioned in our college the craze for orkut is at an all time high.Everybody is in competition to gather the maximum number of friends,even if they don't know the person.Some have notched upwards of 100,150 or even 200 friends.

Some funny things happened today.We are a group of about 15 friends.Every alternate saturday we usually eat out-an escape from unappetizing mess food.The cost is usually shared between three guys whose birthdays are supposed to be just over.But in practice the party might come after seven months of your birthday.At these parties we usually stuff ourselves to our necks.Now this night we did not go to our usual restaurant.After all the eating was over when the fellows who financed us were presented the bill,they were in for a very unpleasant surprise.Instead of the usual 500-600 bucks per head,they had to pay a 1000.Ultimately after some frantic contributions from the others the bill was paid,barely.We swore to give that eatery a wide berth and stick to the usual.You know,as they say,old is gold.

The Return

The Return

Welcome me back to the community of web users. In my last post I mentioned my agonies when I could not access the net. But no more meanings and complaining. A wonderful thing has happened-I got back my connection. It seems that my persistence and about 20 bucks of phone calls and SMSes finally paid off. The guy showed up the other day and did not ask what my problem was simply because he didn’t need to. He got down to solving it. You see, I had called him up so many times that I suspected he considered me to be a big pain in his ass and did not want to be further pestered by me. On my side I was glad that the problem appeared to be on its way to being solved. Anyway I was bracing myself for the worst –a defective cable which would have entailed a further wait of maybe two  to three days-when all I learnt that all these days I was held hostage by a faulty port in the hub. This puny problem was solved in five minutes and since then all has been well and good. I would like to further confess that I found the ending a bit of an anti-climax. Still I was not through with the internet guy. I had paid up for a month of access, but I got for only two weeks. So I was hoping that maybe I might be able to account for the missing time. But I did not think I would get anything, except for some empty words.Gujaratis have an image for being very business minded. But it seemed that my day for surprises was not over. He readily agreed to accept half the stipulated rate for the next month as compensation for the loss of time. Personally I felt that if my problem had been more serious he would not have given in so easily. Anyway we parted amicably, at least me in a happier frame of mind than before.  

Internet woes

Internet woes

I would like to share one of my experiences of what I suppose is the great Indian phenomenon, the absence of accountability. The story told has zero fabrications and without from reality .It happens so that in our hostel rooms there is a sort of arrangement where you can get an internet connection by paying 250 bucks per month. Now the arrangement looked attractive and many, including yours truly signed up for the offer. Cash exchanged hands, cables snaked from the hubs to the rooms and everything seemed hunky dory. But as with all good things, this too was destined to end. And so by some preordained design,when I was savoring the joys of the web for barely two weeks the connection gave up the ghost. I poked about here and there and for the life of me was unable to change the status. The formerly blinking light on the LAN card, an indicator of its vitality was gone. Even after several attempts to revive it which consisted of pulling out the card from its slot and putting it back again and changing slots, some common remedies did not yield any results I had to accept the inevitable –my card was now only a piece of silicon without any function.

So I turned my steps towards our local dealer and after some haggling was the proud owner of a brand new card. Thinking now that my problem was solved, I went through the required preliminaries and sat back to savor the joys of the World Wide Web. But what was this! Let alone the internet I could see only my computer name in the whole network of our hostel computers. Now this seemed to be a more serious matter. Some more poking about and I isolated the snafu, a defective cable. Now the thing was taken out of my hands. All I could do was to contact the service provider, give him my location and wait for him, which I am still doing .Nothing has happened, except for some five more phone calls from my side and his standard reply-Aapka room aur hostel no kya hai? Theek hai kaal aa jaonga.

And I 'm still waiting for the "kaal"to come. This stuff happened two weeks ago and frankly speaking, for someone who is used to the net as I’m, these days have been painful, like waking up after uncontrolled partying with a shitty hangover and a migraine to boot. And so I have learned the hard way that lack of competition breeds incompetence and sloth. And a host of others. Starting alphabetically, you might pick accountability.

What's in a name?

Please neglect my first post.It is more in the naturre of a push so that my blog is up and running.When I decided that I had to own my blog,trusty good ol' google led me to blogspot.And I thought that within ten minutes my thoughts,some innermost ,some not so would be floating about in the ether.But alas,things were not destined to be so simple.Three simple steps-all you have to choose some names as your username,password and the works.But when I keyed in some names like a tropical species of bird found in Brazil,the special forces of Israel,a river in upper Assam the result was the same-this name has already been taken.At that moment it seemed that nothing can be worse off and my imagination has called a wildcat strike.But finally I selected a fairly simple name and hit paydirt-my blog was up and running.But it was not smooth sailing.I originally saved my first post as draft and was unable to access my blog through the url.By this time I was so frustrated that if the creature called blogspot appeared in front of me I would have murdered it.But finally nothing of that sort happened and I am outside bars,thank dog.By the way,a couple of smartasses are bugging me and I have to go.Nowadaysyou just can't work peacefully.