Sunday, November 9, 2008
Friday, April 4, 2008
Disha Of Indian Youth
Today 70% of indian population is below the age of 40 yrs.The average school of thought is:
Have decent education, get a professional degree, get a good job, marry a decent girl/boy, earn a great amount of money & when u retire u should own a nice house in the countryside with a good car in the garage & children settled in their lives.
We all are doing/wanna do any professional course & we are spending our4-6 career defining years in the institutes providing these courses. But are we becoming better citizens after passing out from these institutes? An example to more exemplify my point:"On Republic day & Independence day, we all buy flags but do we know next day where they are? They are on streets, footpaths and many other places and many a time we walk over them without even noticing about them." Do we fully recognize the importance of our national flag?" Let me tell you a story to show the importance of flag. When Alexander-The Great with his army reached Bharat, he was stopped at a village on the border of Bharat by the villagers and a few soldiers of Porus. Alexander couldn't defeat the villagers & move forward.His good luck and he found a traitor who told him the secret to defeat the villagers. He told Alexander until the flag of Poros is there on the top, he could not defeat the villagers. On that night only, the flag was changed & next day, the villagers were defeated & Alexander moved on. This is the importance of a flag.
Our majority of population is below the age of 40. We all want to be engineers, doctors,IS, entreprenuers, architects, fashion designers, writers, journalist etc. and working with an MNC and having a huge paycheque in our pocket at the end of the month.Why our country is being governed by people who don't belong to this majority? Why are they not being replaced? Because younger people are not joining politics.They don't have the compettion.All political parties more or less have same ideologies & way of functioning.Why don't we want to join poltics?Because it's dirty or our parents wanted us to be engineers,doctors,etc. No, because we don't want to. We don't see poltics as a career option. It's a reality. When by preparing 1-2 yrs for a professional course & studying 4-6 yrs. a professional course, u get a good job, all this in a comfortable envoirnment.Then, why would anyone want to spend his whole day out on streets & villages, irrespective of weather, for years. But to upgrade the level of governance, we need young people with new visions. We need younger (corporaters, mayors, MLAs, MPs and younger cabinet minister). Toady in our elections the use of right to vote is exercised mainly by rural India. Majority of people in cities do not vote. Why? Because they cannot connect with the ideologies and policies of present poltical parties. They do not have parties with policies, which they want, in their agenda. We need young people form political parties, contest elections to get this huge population to exercise their right to vote.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Mysetrious Craters On Mercury
Craters come in all shapes and sizes, some more bizarre than others. Recent photos of Mercury have revealed two new categories of crater that scientists are puzzling over how to explain. 
When NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft flew by the planet Jan. 14 it snapped pictures of several craters with strange dark halos and one crater with a spectacularly shiny bottom.
"The halos are really exceptional," said MESSENGER science team member Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "We've never seen anything like them on Mercury before and their formation is a mystery."
Two of the craters are located in Mercury's giant Caloris Basin, a thousand-mile-wide depression formed billions of years ago when Mercury was struck by a comet or asteroid. The larger of the two is about 40 miles wide. Both craters have dark rims or "halos," and one is partially filled with an unknown shiny material.
Chapman offered two possible explanations for the halos:
1. The Layer Cake Theory: There could be a layer of dark material under the surface of Caloris Basin, resulting in chocolate-colored rims around craters that penetrate to just the right depth. If such a subterranean layer exists, however, it cannot be unique to the Basin. "We've found a number of dark halos outside of Caloris as well."
2. The Impact Glass Model: Thermal energy from the impacts melted some of Mercury's rocky surface. Perhaps molten rock splashed to the edge of the craters where it re-solidified as a dark, glassy substance. Similar "impact melts" are found around craters on Earth and the moon. If this hypothesis is correct, future astronauts on Mercury exploring the crater rims would find themselves crunching across fields of tiny glass shards.
Chapman noted that the moon also has some dark haloed craters. "Tycho is a well-known example," he said. But lunar halos tend to be subtle and/or fragmentary. "The ones we see on Mercury are much more eye-catching and distinct."
The difference may be gravity. Lunar gravity is low. Any dark material flying out of a crater on the moon travels a great distance, spreading out in a diffusion that can be difficult to see. The surface gravity of Mercury, on the other hand, is more than twice as strong as the moon's. On Mercury, debris can't fly as far; it lands in concentrated form closer to the impact site where it can catch the attention of the human eye.
None of these explanations account for the shiny-bottomed crater.
"That is an even bigger mystery," Chapman said. Superficially, the bright patch resembles an expanse of ice glistening in the sun, but that's not possible. The surface temperature of the crater at the time of the photo was around 400 degrees Celsius. Perhaps the shiny material is part of another subsurface layer, bright mixed with dark; that would be the Marbled Layer Cake Theory.
"I haven't heard any really convincing explanations from our science team," he said. "We don't yet know what the material is, why it is so bright, or why it is localized in this particular crater."
Fortunately, MESSENGER may have gathered the data researchers need to solve the puzzle. Spectrometers onboard the spacecraft scanned the craters during the flyby; the colors they measured should eventually reveal the minerals involved.
"The data are still being calibrated and analyzed," Chapman said.
If they don't solve the mystery, scientists hope MESSENGER's two upcoming flybys — one in Oct. 2008 and another in Sept. 2009 — will do the trick.
Eventually, Chapmain said, "we'll get to the bottom of this mystery," and probably many more mysteries yet to be revealed.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
A Troubled Neighbourhood
India has two troublesome neighbours and many others who are in trouble but too small to bother about. The small ones are Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. Each has a problem but nothing that any Indian prime minister should lie awake about. It is Pakistan and China which are the two important poles for India's worry.
Of these two, it is Pakistan which is on the mend at least as far as India is concerned. When Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, it was perhaps the first time in decades that India was not blamed by Pakistani authorities.
Indeed, India has not figured at all in the recent Pakistan elections. The elections have now been successfully held and, whatever the next developments, they will occupy Pakistan for some time. If Pakistan has a worry, it is on its western front and not on its eastern front. Pakistan has Afghanistan to replace India as its major headache.
That said, India still has a stake in Pakistan staying united and functioning like a normal rather than a failed state. A strong legitimate government in Pakistan with a mandate to govern is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for that.
The whole nature of the Pakistan federation is skewed too much by dominance of Punjab relative to the other three units. The share of federal resources absorbed by Punjab and its hold over the army and bureaucracy is unhealthy.
In this respect it is a good sign that the PPP, a Sind-based party, has the largest number of seats. It would pay PPP to initiate a dialogue on creating smaller states less unequal in size in a future federation. Or at least redefine the rules of financial allocation so that NWFP and Baluchistan do not get neglected as much as they do at present.
China worries me much more than Pakistan. This is not so much because of Arunachal, though this will surface occasionally. The Chinese have a long-run ambition of restoring their previous boundaries which they feel were nibbled away by imperial powers or by dissident Chinese.
Taiwan remains an obsession, and, while Hong Kong is back in the bag, the old British-drawn borders with India still preoccupy China. Chinese nationalism is territorialist. China was a unified state through 2,000 years of history and became weak only in the 19th century when it began to lose out to western powers. India never did have a unified kingdom or state till the British defined India's boundaries.
My present worry about China is that it seems very fragile underneath its strong exterior. A standard complaint of visitors and policy-makers to India has been the sad state of India's infrastructure. Look at China, they've all said.
But over the harvest moon festival last month, China's infrastructure fell apart in ways India's has never done. Mind you moving 150 million over one weekend cannot be easy. The place goes mad. It is like Pongal and Diwali and Id in one fell swoop.
The transport chaos was spectacular, and, for days on end, there was no solution in sight. Power shortage added to the snowstorm and the Chinese prime minister had to apologise publicly. The point is that while China has built up infrastructure at the posh end - eight-lane highways leading to Shanghai airport and the maglev trains - local passenger suffers from shortages. It is a mark of the elitist model China is following in its growth path which treats ordinary people like dirt.
The basic reason for that is the undemocratic nature of the government. In a recent book, Mark Leonard, who runs a think tank on foreign policy in London, reports on the many discussions going on within China about economic and political reform. Two things struck me. The Chinese intellectuals find myriad objections to democracy - western style, corrupt, limited voter choice etc. They evade the issues cleverly and one can see that until the big brother gives a nod from above, there will be no real progress.
But neither the intellectuals quoted there nor the author himself points out the obvious that next to China, India has already experimented with democracy successfully for 60 years. Indian democracy has its problems but the dishonest evasion of Chinese intellectuals who pray for a perfect democracy or none is pathetic.
The chickens are coming home to roost very soon. When China got the 2008 Olympics, it was argued that this would encourage human rights there. Now Steven Spielberg has already resigned from helping the Olympics event due to China's policy in Darfur. Prince Charles has refused to go there because of Tibet and British athletes are up in arms after being told they can't make a political gesture such as the historic black power salute in the 1968 Olympics.
The Falun Gong will no doubt exploit the presence of 50,000 media persons to get one of them shot in full daylight and cause one or more countries to boycott the games. This is what happened in 1980 in Moscow. It will happen in Beijing this year. China will face humiliation. It may even trigger a destabilising reaction like the Cultural Revolution. Don't say I didn't warn you.
