So Close, Yet So Far!

Only 2 days before the journey I was looking forward to recently, I came across this really disturbing article, which got quite popular on the social networking sites, claiming that the death of the rape victim was hushed up for a few days with money. My friends were also a little sceptical about that. However, I chose not to believe some random article to blame the system to be so corrupt, we've seen the protest was profound.I just made peace with people having different lookout on different things and moved on to other articles. May be, I was not ready to accept the fact that those in such responsible positions, by saying responsible, I don't mean the officials alone,will be using such a sensitive issue to take a chance to make money.Naive! That is the only word I can think of for describing myself!

Days after she lost her life,Just when my friend was telling me today the rape, in a two or three days there will be some other thing, we ll turn the pages of the newspaper and forget it, I had to take a cab, the very next day, not so early in the morning, but quite early at 8 a.m and I was glad even though the police stopped the car just 2 minutes after we started and I was getting late, but I was glad because they stopped the cab because the glasses were tinted light grey, translucent vision for the outsiders, not the completely opaque tint, I felt good, as the repercussions of the rape case brought in some really strong measures, and unlike the traffic rules, which are more often than not violated are being strictly mandated and taken care of. I felt proud, to have known that all is not lost. A moment of happiness and reassurance for not taking into the articles. Well that didn't long last!

After about 10 minutes out of the cab, the driver came back in and started driving towards the destination. I was curious to know how he got off from the police. He casually answered 'I gave him Rs 200!' . I can't say I was shocked,but I felt really sad. Just when I thought, we are getting close as nation, a step,though tine, closer to making women feel safe, this incident took me light years away,pushing hope into abyss! Oh! So close, yet so far! Reiterating, yet again, that laws can not be all.. I shut my brain up! Not one is to be blamed. We are all the same, and that is a shame!

Just when I thought the taint of this city, I love like crazy, of being a rape capital can be washed out, with organisational determination, the malady of corruption comes from behind with a dagger,betraying while making space to restate inefficiency in every form possible. Are we really hoping for too much? Can the dreams of the head being held nigh ever come true? Well even if there is a remote chance of that happening, the fare seems to be too high to pay.

Money!! Money!! Whether we sail or drown, whether the terminus will be sought in good shape. Yeah, true but tragic, money, it seems is the one thing that deceives us from dreams and makes vulnerable enough to succumb to the desires! 

Why was I so upset, when I already knew what was going to happen? It was nothing new. Well, I could answer that only with one word 'Hope'. Hopefully, atleast that ll never die. I guess I am too curious to know the power of unity to say 'No'. The collective urge to realise that 'Being Human' just means, a little trust and faith, a little give and take, a little philanthropy and selfishness, a little rage and equanimity,a little sorrow and a tad of happiness, all put together. May be that is the miracle we are all working together for.

Yesterday it was a brutal rape, today a sewn time bomb inside a jawan's belly.What all we get to see!! And we talk of being human! The only things being constant are corruption and deception, and they always give ample space to the acute veneration for tomorrow. Is any step we take really taking us forward?

Sigh!

My very first Lohri!!

January 13th, 2013!
Woah!! Look at that,it is two 13s there! ;)

Haha! For everyone who said that today.. I just wanted to share something I realised today, I felt it was important I wrote it down somewhere(later thought, why not share), lest I overlook and forget! It might sound stupid for some,nevertheless that wouldn't stop me from writing it here!

We have so many superstitions, (the 13 thingy I was referring to before), true having an awful day gives every reason to sulk, But doesn't that only mean, this placebo is robbing you of all the opportunities that can kick the day up?! That is old wine! Yeah, it is a universal truth so, I don't have anything new to share there,moving on.

Ohkk ok,Here is what I really wanted to write on,We are so vulnerable and gullible most of the times. We are so full of inhibitions (This stands no exception to the so-called most egalitarian societies of the west). We judge! A lot, and today, I realised that does more harm to us than to the person who is being judged! It is like living in a coffin. Though I can not share the incident that made me realise this, here is what, We end up naming relationships, quantifying them. We always have this preconceived notion that some people 'close' to us can always make us happy. While some people, are always nettlesome. Not at all true.
Well,an hour of Lohri celebrations, pop corn, winter night,bonfire, songs and a few friends, shattered this impression of mine. I had one of the most memorable days, away from home.

Turns out,a truly hearty, selflessly happy person can always make others happy. It is like the sun! It is a radiation,warm and soothing.
People are only what their feelings make them, we never know what their journey is all about,judging them would be robbing ourselves from all the happiness a person can potentially share with us! We might as well make ourselves less gullible.

May be a little less of judgement, can promise a hell lot of happiness. People may not be the same, but then unfeignedly shared happiness has no substitutes. True celebration, is all about sharing,shattering all the inhibitions we brought along with us! We all come in uniquely wonderful, the pursuit might change us,after all.. It is but the 'Difficulty of being Good '

Namma Ooru!!

I have always had a special place for Chennai and Bangalore in my heart, while the same has never been true with Hyderabad! Seriously, all my Hyderabad friends, trust me when I say I have many, will kill me reading this, but that is the truth.. I never hated the city, it is just that I did not have anything worthwhile there, that could make me love the place. May be I ll alter my opinion to subsequently falsify what I said earlier if I have a better Hyd-experience, sometime later. 

Coming back to what I actually want to say, I can't vouch as much for Chennai as I can to, for Bangalore, as my stay there was not considerably that long.. I heard many of my friends complaining about the dirt, noise and the autos (Haha! ;) ). But,I must say,Chennai! What a place! I loved the food(yeah, I am a foodie!), the vivacious places, the unfathomed history the place holds, the serenity and the revel of the beach, I can go on for two days non-stop, in praise of that place. The second best thing about this place is it's unique, relentlessly vivid betiding surroundings, wherever and whenever you go. That would only be the second best thing because, the best-est (Sorry, one superlative will just not do, for what I am about to say) thing about the place is wait-for-it the People. Everyone is ever-ready to help, and anyone answers to the call, 'Anna'. There are malls and fastfoods,but there is always Dosai (yum!!),Idli and Sambar. They can all speak brilliant English, but when they meet a Tamilian they never speak in anything other than Tamizh. The love they have for their language and customs made me admire the language ever more. They have everything about modernity, but they graciously embrace their culture in tender care. I think I made my point clear enough.. I love that place..
Need I even start speaking of Bangalore? I did not even feel like I was away from home. Everyone speaks English, Kannada, Telugu and Tamil, God! they are adaptive, and they are very helpful. I never saw a city that has access to modern amenities and yet so carefully has greenery embedded right next to it. May be, the place I spent most of the time was like that, but that was in the heart of the city, what can I complain about. You get everything in Bengalooru, everywhere. And the best thing is you always see someone you know(Mostly BITSians ;) ). That was the first time I actually felt bad I was leaving a place to go home.. Well it was not just about the place, it had many other people-reasons.I have had some really bedevilling experiences in the rainy season. One of my colleague got mugged(yeah you read that right, he got mugged).Nevertheless, it is one place that changes people to their best. A place no one would ever resist to fall madly in love with..

When it comes to these two places, I would never think twice before saying "They are 'my' places! As good as Home" <gladly, with a grin!>

The point is, the other day when I was reading the newspaper, I read about the Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bombay exodus. It made me sad. The places which many people considered their homes were not so welcoming anymore, rather they were threatening the crap out of them. That lingered, as later that evening I was checking my Facebook profile and there were so many morphed humour images about the 5 SMS per day thing. First few, I was fine, reading and enjoying the humour, later on it got a bit too much of me I guess, got rubbed the wrong side. I think I was sad about the jokes that were circulating, more than I was irritated, I was sad.Or may be I lost my sense of humour, you can play the jokes on me, but these days all the jokes are about relationships,after a point of time it gets boring you see, there is so much more in humour than that(Sorry, but I grew up watching Jandhyala movies, so I think I enjoyed better jokes).Anyways, "Marry the girl/guy who sends you all 5 messages"???!!! Really?! When people are so concerned about  the national security and the crisis being faced by so many Indians that are dealing with a scarred psychosis of fear and anxiety, all we are concerned about is the messages we can send to our friends? Pardon me, but that was what I felt. It all dishes out to be.. Hmm.. may be it is a bit too strong a word to use but that was 'Shallow'. Thousands of people are moving away from what they called their home for years out of the fear of ferocity, they left behind their dreams and aspirations, education and achievements, oppurtunities and incentives, just to stay alive, in their own country, where they have the complete freedom to move. And all this, happening in the places I love so much made me even more sad. Deplorable and distressing. The first verse that our parents taught us, was "Athithi Devobhava". The first pledge we promised to honour, at school was "All Indians are my brothers and Sisters". We grew up listening to mythological stories, of Mahabharatha and Ramayana, which led to seriously endangering curses that were only a result of minimal mockery. We learnt better. And this exodus happens just after the Independence day after we all replenish our pride in our country. It is all just too ironical. And yet, there is no place, time or space for us to give a soothing to the people who are the victims of this exodus. Ok! May be I am being too heedfully grevious about this. For me to tell in the same tone as the jokes,to me, these jokes on SMS look like this: Imagine, a software engineer, had a completely screwed up day with his Project Lead shouting at him infront of all his subordinates,a huge set back in the code he was brainstorming on for months,everything that could possibly go wrong in a day went wrong to the rattling extrema and when he came home frustrated, his wife at home was complaining about her broken nail. Yeah, it is THAT lame. May be I would expect someone to be less sarcastic about the whole SMS thing and realise how essential it is to control the whole situation. It is not that I am taking a political stand on this issue, but when people can't trace the root the next obviously logical thing would be to take the situation under control by calming the nerves. It is only coherent. With the raging mobiles and multi-media services it only becomes imperative for the control to be on what quantum of information that can best be committed to the public. One need not support the SMS control actions, but one need not be so visible of their brassy sarcasm either. I am not being judgemental of the humour or the people here, it is only an opinion. One of my close friends found it to be plain humour and could pass it off in a whiff too. But only, I was expecting us to be more concerned about the greater good. This is not, having an exact idea of how others around me should be or passing judgements on people. This is only an opinion of how the events can turn into being better, if we were more sensitive to the issue. It is not a judgement. It is only reminding me of what we were taught to live with, and how paradoxically diametric our choices really are. No one would want people to speak ill of their home. May be the love I have for the places is making me say this, I do not want people to speak ill of those places, I don't want them to leave distressed.

On a larger note,coming to the censors that took course in the social media, the life line of today's communications, that friend of mine, who was actually having a stand against the course of blocking the communication quantums, and me, had a huge debate on this. Censorship regarding the tweets was being perceived as a set back to the Right to freedom of speech and expression and that the events unfolding were only being looked upon as the state's aggressiveness, barging into privacy and other issues of it's citizens. I did not want to assert my opinion on  that friend of mine but I had a different tone to set. We discussed. I was reading the paper for quite sometime now, having catoons about a famous personality I admire the most for some years now. But those cartoons did not get to my nerves, freedom of speech and expression I could respect to,then. But when the question is about national security it has to be in a safe position for whatever it takes it to be sure. Again, I can not stress this enough, but that is my opinion about the events that have been unfolding lately..

May be we can all  find a way to make peace with the SMS strain posed on us and make efforts to make people feel at home. May be, we can stop pulling jokes to make way to images  and texts that can soothe and calm their nerves. May be, we can make our homes, their homes too. May be, we can all share the fruits of falling in love with a place with asuring them that they are safe in a place where they are surrounded by fellow- citizens, their brothers and sisters. May be we can replenish their faith in the solemn avow of 'All Indians are our brothers and sisters'. May be, we can all make them love the simple phrase of 'Feel at home'.
This greatly reminds me of a Telugu song that is really thought provoking..

"Kanapadevi ennenni keratalu kalagalipi samudram antaaru, adagare okkokka ala peru..
Manakila eduraina prathi vaaru manishi ane sandrana keratalu, palakare 'manishi' ante evaru.." (Gamyam)
[The number of waves in concert together, make an ocean. We never ask the identity of each wave in separation. The populous we see everyday are the waves of humanity.. But why is it that no one responds to the call of 'human' ]

May be.. we can all prove to be more relaible and more welcoming for them, not to leave out of fear, but stay out of love! We can all,together, fly free, to chase the wind and touch the skies, only to realise our dreams and aspirations, Feeling at home, with every step we take, everywhere!

Ithu Namma Ooru!

Aspire..

"Hey,look for the green file in the lobby, I am getting really late for the class.." She opened the cupboard, to check for the file there. She knew that the chances of finding it there are really thin, the top drawer,which was not opened for the last few months since her uncle passed away, she did not want to lose even the thinnest of chance to find it, for, she was really getting late. She always used those hand-made files from the SHG she worked for, beautiful as they seemed and also a little something to help the others. She was groping the top drawer for the file,when a roll of paper, as thick as a parchment fell down. To her surprise, it was addressed to her.. Unfolding, she started reading it, it was from her uncle, her father's brother, who was her guardian since long..


" 10th September 2007,
I might be dead long before you read this. But you should know,I was dead. Since yesterday. The day your parents died in the flyover collapse. Even as I wipe my tears off, anger, frustration and self hatred are brimming upon me! I always wanted to tell this to you,but I think it weighed too heavy on me that the chances are, you might hate me.. You are the only ray of hope left for me to move towards forgiving myself, and I did not want to lose that. The truth is, I am responsible for debasing myself,I was corrupt. And that pain anchors heavily on me. It all came back rushing to me when you scarpered, tears rolling down your cheeks, from the tragic scene where your parents lay numb. You knew they were not going to get back to you ever. When I got the contract of the flyover,I got it because I was bribing.Not because I was efficient, not because I was the most suitable for the job. Not because I deserved it. I bribed the officer. When he did not knuckle under, I used the kin force. I gained a lot of money, with which I sent my son to the US.. I was happy. But it shortlived. How the hell did I know that one day, my brother, and his wife, sincere and true to heart teachers as they were, would lay dying under the collapsed flyover? Leaving you an orphan, under the preview of a corrupt guardian such as me..They only left me a life full of remorse. I could not share this with you earlier. I can not bear the feeling that you would see me as the murderer who took your family away from you. But it is my responsibility that I should keep you informed, even from beyond! The day you came to stay with me forever, is the day I realized how gruesome a life I was leading. I stopped contracts. I was a bigger person from then on. I know that this is not the appropriate way of letting you know that your parents' murderer,has been your guardian all along.But,against all the odds,I hope somewhere,sometime down the lane,you can forgive me. I think somewhere deep down I know I would not be able to look directly into your eyes filled with hatred, no.. not even on my death bed, and that is  why this letter. I hope the blotches of tears will not vitiate what I wanted to say. I now know the cost of corruption. You know that my good wishes will always be with you.
Love,
Uncle (If you can still call me that)"


A letter, a piece of paper has changed all that has happened to her, her whole life, all that she has believed in.It was from that person who taught her that 'Life is beautiful'. But it turns out,Life is clasped tight in the many paths you have to choose, which path you take, which color you apply to make it beautiful, is totally in your hands.

Puffy-eyed, she thought of the last time she saw her parents, through the balcony when they were going to get her the Harry Potter book she has been nagging them to buy.They never returned. She walked up and down the hallway, clutching the letter tight. On hearing the loud footsteps, she looked up and on seeing him at a distance, a faint smile appeared on her face.As he walked closer to her, she gained some strength she lost in the last few minutes. He sat next to her, gave her the file and asked her what the matter was. She shook her head, gesturing everything was fine.Its her husband. Yeah, everything is going to be fine. She knows,though not at the moment, she is going to forgive her uncle, after all, he died of remorse, she is a bigger person than he was,now, she has a husband who is a social worker, who never in his living nightmare,would offer anyone a penny to bribe. She is a teacher, and works with the Self help groups. She is on the right side of the coin. She clutched the file, and took steps towards the school, as she knows, somewhere down the lane, she will influence at-least one person to stick to morale and be truly humane all life long. She knows, her job is what moulds the future, she knows that what she is doing is what is going to save more people from getting victimized. She can pay back to the society for what her uncle did. She was sitting in a corner, wiping the tears off her cheeks with the ends of her sari. Life goes on, but only towards a better tomorrow..

Cyber Rebirth

It must be because of my graduation and three months of corporate life after that, for all the problems I am studying about right now, I am tending towards a cyber solution, to be frank we need to agree that there is mounting importance in making the two ropes into a knot, for development.

- With growing concerns about ‘privacy’, everyone wants a secure and flashy site, whatever the need be. 

- User Interface grows in importance as the internet users increase in number

In a day of great advances in the Server Technology and Server Protection tactics in the cyber world, it is but an ignominy that an individual could hack eight Indian government sites, all of which after hacking are not of great difficulty to be defaced, keeping in view the stature of the source code it can have. It is of great importance, that in an age where a school kid relies on the internet to complete his homework, the government sites in India are in such a vulnerable situation.

SERVER SECURITY:

India, an emerging power in the field of information technology, known for the number engineers it produces year after year, does not have a decent way of protecting the sites from getting hacked, let alone portraying the services online? How would a customer, with growing awareness for privacy, trust the online services with the sites being so assailable?  Need is that the sites are developed in security and design to appeal to the customers, like the private sector is attracting customers.

As a country producing 3 million new graduates, of which 1.1 million are software engineers, each year, with adept human resources in the field of IT, it is deplorable that when a mere citizen having a Social networking site, page can control with great efficiency the information available about him on the net, the nation is not able to look into checking the number of sites being hacked every day.

Seems like the Technology Vaporware, 2009 could only get down the numbers from 600s to 117. Though a great number progress has been made, for a country like India, with such a stature in Information Technology, the numbers are still high. Most of the government sites take advantage of frames in presenting a large amount of information in a static web page which is vulnerable to the techniques used to gain access to unauthorized information through advanced search queries. Google hacking employs searching sites using special characters, logical operators and operators such as cache, filetype, link, site, intitle, inurl.

Lack of a prescribed procedure for auditing, hosting, maintenance and upgrading of security measures and new advancements can be taken as he main reasons for this.   

·        Government websites and applications have to be audited from the cyber security perspective prior to their hosting and after, on a regular basis, like really strict vigilance.

·        Hosting the websites which haven’t undergone a strict cyber security audit should not be made possible.

·        Immediate action should be taken in upgrading the security of the hosting structure.

·        Alerts regarding the latest developments in cyber crime and how to dodge them.

·        Damage caused by Cross site shifting should be  taken into consideration.

·        Any form of inputs like page headers, cookies, query string, hidden fields used on forms and forms fields used to gather some sort of input from the users should be validated before an update.

DESIGN AND USER-INTERFACE:

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

Nevertheless, it is true that what looks good is called ‘attractive’ for a reason. More than 66% of the users give importance to the design and user interface, in a site that provides or vouches for services. Serious thought has to be put in the direction of improving the design and support patterns that are incorporated in various Indian websites, especially those that are into services related to communication. Less number of frames can be incorporated in the website to make them more browser compatible, look wise. Also, for those who say that the ‘Lorem Ipsum factor’ of saying that the design matters only a little, in today’s world one has to realise the importance of design and User Interface compatibility to an average customer. When the appearance causes a deep veneration and presentation remains good, also as long as one can place trust in the security systems only then can one want to be a customer.

Though impossible to negate the hacks in total, a dedicated capacity of efforts has to be put into this area not only to protect the government sites from being hacked, but also to improve the reliance of the people on the public sector sites for information and services.

Yellow Journalism | Prohibit Pulitzer or A Riot against Randolph?

39,775 newspapers

4,207 dailies
14,00 telivision stations
India: The second largest market in the world for newspapers


After waking up late and reading the Newspaper for some time, I was really keen on doing something fun to make up for my extremely lazy weekend that summer all I could come up with, is some junk food by my side and a remote control!! :D Seee.. You are right.. Television! :D is the only thing that comes to mind.. right?

Huh.. Wait for it..
That was not the first time I heard of a criminal offense in the city, but.. Butchering is what we can call, pestering an already chafed and galled mother, Tears streaming down her cheeks, refusing to stop, of
the utterly agonizing murder of her eumoirous daughter, with unending questions for that was what I see when I was lazily scanning through those news channels. The controlled tears brimming in her eyes asked several questions.. Her tears, went unanswered!

'Bing!!'
There.. I commute to a safer zone frustrated with the urge to find something soothing.. Eventually ending up with those channels which are least bothered even if the third world war is about to commence, and all that matters is a spouse's distress in a daily serial which is not even remotely TRUE!! What we see is a young lad challenging his so-called-mentor (who are never, surprisingly, taken-aback) about his skills, everything that shows his disrespect and overconfidence which comes to a young lad whenever there is a corrected ego as a result, masquerading his actual reason of being there! Couldn't take it any longer..

That is it! There is a 'Bing!!' Here again!!
To yet another station which interestingly anchors.. Of how they sold their soul to the craving before mutilating innocence!

Lol things?? Haha! There was this ‘one n half hour’ program on a celebrity’s marriage and his affairs!! Yeah, admirers would want to know personal details.. But one n half hour?!!! Come on!! And may be if I waited, they would have spoken about many other ‘sensational’ things. So, when you wonder why someone on the TV says they spoke to Obama aide and that aide said Obama will drop out soon, just remember what Yellow Journalism is. When you want to know why MSNBC trashes Hillary, dismiss it as move on and don't give in to the "shock value" that drives what they report and how they report it.

Need less to say, A country with the second largest market in the world for newspapers, that country which ranks 4th in the list of countries by number of television broadcast stations, is no exception, invigorated by the Yellow fever! Lack of good is not what a person is complaining about!! Ethics! Lack of ethics is what is being questioned here!!

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil, is something that was long forgotten by the media that is now suffering with the yellow fever.. "Yellow journalism" (The Spanish American war did not teach anything! No aversive stimulus! Rather promised a reward’!! ) Today, the most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust. A free press will either be good or bad but a press without freedom is nothing but bad. Well if 'freedom' was understood as sensationalism, distorted stories, and misleading images for the sole purpose of boosting newspaper sales and exciting public opinion. A small voice in my head says.. 'Sorry, we are not for it!' (Conveniently unheeding the other instincts)

Meanwhile, the TRP ratings for all those 'Bing!!!s' reach a sky-high value... I don't pause and say "Uff!!! Audience!!" ( Wanna add more?! ) Ratings=Money that's what it is all about.We talk about a free press. They hide, behind the slogans of free press make a lot of money, they can come out with any crap. It's an insult to the readers.

They make us believe things.
The first search result on Google India for ‘Trust in media’ is
“Don’t trust Indian Media!” (Yeah, ‘with’ an exclamation!!!)
It is still the same, they make us be’LIE’ve things.

What is to be done? Prohibit Pulitzer?? Riot against Randolph?? Haahh!! Why not conveniently go for the 'None of the above' option? Now, all of sudden after so many years of yellow fever, A HRC comes up to realize the violation of the Human Rights 'in every aspect', yet giving an open chance to the respective TV channel managements to discuss on the verdict delivered by Commission which ofcourse obviously goes into the list of the conveniently tackledtaboos.. Quest to impute someone?? The media? The system? Or the audience?? Whom?? Or may be.. I let myself go for the 'None of the above' again... Slyly raking through those 14,00 options infront of me for something that is less disturbing... Or may be, thought provoking!! Well, if this is the case.. How many of you chose none of the above??
BREAKING NEWS!!! ??? When they begin to look like the rest of them, It's hard to pull them back. Astray. Dismiss it and move on, and don't fall for it. I think we're all smarter than this. But deep down somewhere, I know.. Someday Sometime.. I ll find another option and I ll choose that, to make a change! The ungratified mind rants.. Though clearly ignored...
Bing!!!