Govt announces 27% reservations for other backwards castes in India in educations of higher learning based on the Mandal Commisions report ... YAWWWN

When I read about the Reservation issue, one fact strikes me. That it is a old report...somewhere in the 70's.

Why is this being treated like the Gita and Koran rolled into one? With so much money and brainpower at his disposal, why cannot a new commission be appointed which looks into this issue and comes up with a real Mandal II report.

It may not necessarily be an attempt to denigrate the earlier work done by Mr. Mandal, but simply an acknowledgement that much water has flown under the bridge since then, and a fresh stocktaking might be useful.

Suppose a renowned experts were called from all over India ( and the world maybe ) and given a good salary, a team of legworkers, assistants etc, and a years time to examine the issue in depth and come up with a report. Would that necessarily be viewed as a bad thing? Can we not find 20 wise men who still have credibility? Lets take a fresh look.

I wonder why this never happens? Maybe the Mandal report was a definitive report and took decades to accomplish...still this new commission can add on to it...like notes added to an old book which comes out in a new edition...

poem

a poem, penned during the Nazi era

First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.

n sum more

 
 
 
  

some more pics

 
 
 
  

first leg of trip - pics

 
 
 
  

kickass story...man chases cop

this is one beautiful story..ranks right up there with the story of how dalbir took 2500 rupees off a traffic cop in delhi...(story will be posted soon )

read it on the guys blog here ...

an excerpt below -

I stopped next to the officer, and for the first time I realised he was an Assistant Commissioner of Police!! I told him that I noted down his vehicle number, and he’s soon going to have a nice time. He was totally flummoxed, and he said he has my number too. You should have seen the look on his face when I volunteered to give him my name and contact address. First a small shock, then slightly bigger, and now a virtual slap in the face!! He grabbed the radio, and started barking some instructions into it, maybe to psyche me out, make me believe that I’d get picked up at the next junction or something. I said I don’t care, and asked him to show me his name badge. He was trying his best to hide it from me, and boy oh boy, was he doing a lousy job! The signal time was counting down too slowly for his liking, and he was badly cornered. He finally showed me his name badge, and by now people were looking at us, and wondering how and why they were witnessing this role reversal of a popular TV series called “World’s Wildest Police Videos”!! The signal finally went green, and he got away. I turned left and continued to my actual destination.

Vacationing and vacating

well i was away...

i was on vacation...

after a year of being a good boy and working my way through corpoland... the old soul was becoming corpulent and needed indulgence....so i moaned on the phone to the big boss..who first thought i was going to quit...so desperate did my pleas sound....then he negotiated me down from 4 weeks to two..and i was handed my ticket to 2 weeks of living like a man on this land...to feel the breeze on my face..the sun in my eyes...the sand in my toes and the chance to live away from my box of concrete, my box of metal and rubber which runs on petrol..and my my box in a box with a box on a desk which is where i see what i type appear.

landed in chennai on friday night....drove all night along the east cost road and reached pondycherry just as dawn was breaking. Found a lovely machan house..or hut on stilts...by the beach and settled in...and the next few days passed by like three years... detoxing...dry cleaning...emptying out.... Moved on and travelled overnight and reached bangalore in the morning.... stayed a few days with my sister and played with my lil niece who at the age of 10 months can scroll down to her favourite ringtone on most cellphones. Then onwards to guwahati in the eastern corner of india... it had been a dream of mine to do this once....10 days in the land of the brahmaputra, where tribes with names like Khasi, Garo, Bodo, Naga live...and where the mountains are carpeted in green and shrouded in wispy white veils, where humans live with respect for nature and life flourishes beautifully.

walked along the mountain trails...bathed in streams, rivulets, lakes, waterfalls and hotel shower cubicles, ate all sorts of things, smoked peace pipes with strangers sitting alone tending to their little meadows on their mountains and it was fun.. saw the bangladesh border ..saw the army camps...saw the tribal dances...saw a society where women dominate, property is inherited from mother to daughter and after marriage the groom goes to live with in his wifes house, where women are not looked at like commodities, where there are no strangers and people help each other and where all of these tribes are engaged in a dance to the death, fighting among each other, trying to jostle into positions of power and influence and theres a new movement everyday....all in all one incredible vibrant mad and merry part of india....but sadly messed up because of guns per capita ratio.

took a few photographs...will post soon.

i spy with my hidden eye

The average London commuter is covertly videotaped anywhere from 10 to 300 times daily.

some picsfrom home n nearby