I started writing again in my old blog. The one I had before I switched to WordPress. Guess, it’s just a small salutation for introducing me to blogging.
Blog
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The Ant and the Grasshopper
I don’t get too many email forwards. So, when I got one, I decided to post it. No other intention behind this post. Thanks for the forward, Nupur.
OLD VERSION…
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant’s a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
MODERN VERSION…
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant’s a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.NDTV , BBC, CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.
The World is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be that this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Arundhati Roy stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house. Medha Patkar goes on a fast along with other grasshoppers demanding that grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climates during winter.
Amnesty International and Ban Ki-moon (UN Secretary General) criticize the Indian Government for not upholding the fundamental rights of the grasshopper.
The Internet is flooded with online petitions seeking support to the grasshopper (many promising Heaven and Everlasting Peace for prompt support as against the wrath of God for non-compliance) . Opposition MP’s stage a walkout.Left parties call for “Bharat Bandh” in West Bengal and Kerala demanding a Judicial Enquiry.CPM in Kerala immediately passes a law preventing Ants from working hard in the heat so as to bring about equality of poverty among ants and grasshoppers.
Lalu Prasad allocates one free coach to Grasshoppers on all Indian Railway Trains, aptly named as the ‘Grasshopper Rath’.
Finally, the Judicial Committee drafts the Prevention of Terrorism Against Grasshoppers Act [POTAGA]“, with effect from the beginning of the winter.
Arjun Singh makes Special Reservation for Grass Hopper in educational Insititutions & in Govt Services.
The ant is fined for failing to comply with POTAGA and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by The Government and handed over to the grasshopper in a ceremony covered by NDTV.
Arundhati Roy calls it “a triumph of justice”. Lalu calls it ‘Socialistic Justice’. CPM calls it the ‘revolutionary resurgence of the downtrodden’
Ban Ki-moon invites the grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly.
MANY YEARS LATER…
The ant has since migrated to the US and set up a multi billion dollar company in silicon valley.100s of grasshoppers still die of starvation despite reservation somewhere in India…
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Ryszard on India
India was my first encounter with otherness, the discovery of a new world. It was at the same time a great lesson in humility. I returned from that journey embarrassed by my own ignorance. I realized then what seems obvious now: another culture would not reveal its mysteries to me at a mere wave of my hand. One has to prepare oneself thoroughly for such an encounter.My initial reaction to this lesson was to run home, to return to places I knew, to my own language, to the world of already familiar signs and symbols. I tried to forget India, which signified to me my failure: its enormousness and diversity, its poverty and riches, its incomprehensibility had crushed, stunned, and finally defeated me. Once again, I was glad to travel around Poland, to write about its people, to talk to them, to listen to what they had to say. We understood each other instantly, were united by common experience.
But of course I remembered India. The more bitter the cold of the Polish winter, the more readily I thought of hot Kerala; the quicker darkness fell, the more vividly images of Kashmir’s dazzling sunrises resurfaced. The world was no longer uniformly cold and snowy but had multiplied, become variegated: it was simultaneously cold and hot, snowy white but also green and blooming.
Those are the concluding paragraphs of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s essay, “The Open World“, translated from Polish by Klara Glowczewska and published in the February 5, 2007 New Yorker.
This from Ethan Zuckerman’s blog. Thanks, Ethan.
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A Few Links…
It’s really very funny experience if you want to blog about space. You love the subject. You can talk for hours, given the chance, but to write a good blog post will take you days and days.
Well, all said and done, I have nothing useful to add today. Here are some links –
1. India’s Chandrayaan-I project scheduled for departure on 30 March, 2008. Chandrayaan-II coming up in 2010.
2. The recent testing of SRE and the launch of 3 sats together on the PSLV-C7.
3.India’s best offering in terms of images of the Earth from space – CARTOSAT-2. -
Yuri’s Night
Well, some sort of order has been done. All the things that I wanted sorted are sort of, sorted.
We’d like to hold an event called Yuri’s Night in India. Any ideas? Any thoughts?
Yuri’s Night is an event held across the globe to commemorate the first man in space – Yuri Gagarin. Any ideas, anyone ready to give us a place to do the event, that would be great.
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Raindrops…
Woke up to a strange morning and freakish weather. It’s raining here in the middle of February. An un-paralleled event?
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Interesting Stuff from ISRO
India has today announced the launching of its own navigation satellite system. The date for the launch of Chandrayaan-I has also been announced as 30 March, 2008. Mark the date in your calendars.
There has also been talks of having a lunar lander by 2020. Interesting stuff coming from ISRO.
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Trying
I’m now trying to get out of stuff and trying to get back in. That’s another way of telling that I’m trying to get organised. I’ve tried most of the famous methods of getting organised. They all fail. Teh-solutions don’t work since I’m not a techie. The latest I’ve tried is a TODO which also failed.
In the end, I’ve decided to make my own organization technique. Mail me if you’re interested in helping me: prad2609@yahoo.com.
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Korolev’s Centenary Celebrations
Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://blogs.seds.org/pradeep. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on February 08, 2007 as per the timestamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.
I attended the Korolev centenary celebrations yesterday. Started of like all Indian events do – with the lighting of the lamp. There was a photo exhibition that we walked through. Lot of cool pics – the early control rooms that the Soviet’s useds, their rockets, their launch pads and ofcourse, Korolev himself.
A couple of lectures later, we had some Indian twist in the form of screening the SRE mission. I didn’t post about the SRE here.
It happened on 22nd January, 2007. India tested its indigenously developed re-entry technology along with the launch of 4 satellites on board the PSLV-C7. SRE stands for Space Vehicle Re-entry Experiment. You’ll find a good deal more in the ISRO website.
Well, the Korolev evening ended with Cocktails. Since, I don’t drink, I settled for a Coke. Well, had a good time.
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You know when you’re stressed when
Want proof that I can’t blog? Here it is. Found this in the local paper. Felt emailing it would be a waste of email, so decided to post it here for all to see (is anyone seeing?).
You Know You’re a victim of exam stress when:
- Random Shah Rukh Khan movies begin to look like top-class entertainment.
- Your favourite pastime is tearing up sheets of paper
- Your daily vocabulary is reduced to: crap, damn, hell, bloddy, goddamn.
- You shoot stapler pins all over the room just to see how far they go.
- You sit blankly at your table, staring at the same sheet of paper for half an hour.
- Your diet consists of 3 Cs: coffee, choclate and Crocin
- You pray for floods, heat strokes, strikes of teachers and the death of G. W. Bush; so that exams are postponed or cancelled.
- You read the “love messages” on the bottom panel of MTV to de-stress
- You do chapters that aren’t in the syllabus
- You find yourself incredibly fantasising about Goa and Lonavla
- Approximately four times a day, you feel like running away from home and selling coconuts in Kerala
By Mudra Mehta of NM College, as published in JAM. Go there for more fun articles.
Parallel Spirals 