Sunrise or Sunset...

A Beautiful Sunrise? or A Brilliant Sunset? Sunrise over the Indian Ocean off the coast of Pondicherry? Sunset over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego? Who cares? As the Bard of Avon states - As you like it.

A Model, a role model at that...

From the South Asia pages of the Beeb a.k.a BBC.

A heart-warming story of Guriya Khatoon.

Five Years Studies done in Nine Months.

Some may fold in the face of a single strike. Not this girl. All of thirteen years young. Talk about perseverence and guts. She had three strikes against her - poverty - Bihar - gender. Pile up the fact that her family tried to hush her up behind a purdah because she is Muslim.

Yet, in her own words - "...you have to face all your challenges in life, but most of all get an education. Because without it, you can't change your life - or your world."

Yes, Minister

James Hacker: Opposition is all about asking awkward questions.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: And Government is about not answering them!

Just one of the many memorable exchanges between the Minister for Administrative Affairs Jim Hacker (played memorably by Paul Eddington) and his Permanent Under-Secretary of State Sir Humphrey Appleby (played by Nigel Hawthorne). Throw in the Principal Private Secretary Bernard Woolley (played by Derek Fowlds) and you had an awesome threesome of comedy.

And for the unitiated, this is from the classic 80's comedy sitcome of the venerable BBC - Yes, Minister. A political satire of the first order, it is well written, and resonates very well, even today, even here in the US.

To paraphrase the BBC's own description:

Clever and complex plotting, cracking and convoluted dialogue, accurately drawn observations and top-notch acting all combined to create a Rolls-Royce of a show that ran with the smoothness of that engine and the precision of a ministerial cover-up. Co-writer Jonathan Lynn saw the show in simple terms: a Jeeves-and-Wooster concept wherein 'the servant is cleverer than his master'.

Lets just say it doesn't take much for a show to get established as top-of-the-line. Hey, you know its good when my only exposure to this show was in the mid 80's pre-cable India when the telly was entirely state-owned and controlled.

Jim Hacker the politician veers from his ideas of commitments to his electorate to his ideas of protecting his own hide/seat. And he is either abetted in his ideals to protect his seat or frustrated in his ideals of serving by the electorate by his typically-bureaucratish bureaucrat Humpy Appleby. And though, if they were real people, (and if they were indeed real, my experience with the system in India would attest to the fact that the show wasn't far away from the truth, and India's systems are designed after the British system) I would be hopping mad, now I am just howling in laughter watching these episodes on DVD.

And the dialog writers have unearthed gems of dialog in the shows episodes...

"If people don't know what you're doing, they don't know what you're doing wrong."
"[Citizens of a democracy] have a right to be ignorant. Knowledge means complicity and guilt. Ignorance has a certain...dignity."
"It used to be said there are two kinds of chairs to go with two kinds of Minister. One sort folds up instantly, and the other sort goes round and round in circles."
"I don't want the truth. I just want something I can tell the Parliament!"

There are many many more gems in the 21 episodes of this series. Once I am finished with them I can't wait to get onto the sequel - "Yes, Prime Minister".

All aboard! The comedy train is rumbling!

Science Top 10

"Evolution is not just something that scientists study as an esoteric enterprise." - Colin Norman, Science

This quote prefaces the BBC's article on the Science magazine's article featuring the Top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2005.

Curiously enough, experiments and studies that furthered the understanding of evolution (Evolution in action) were named as the top breakthrough of 2005. [Curiously, because of the "debate" over the validity of evolutions' claims, and because of the alternate "theory" purporting to supernatural forces designing life reached tipping point in multitudes of court cases in the US. Heck, even the White House had comments on it. The debate, and its associated contrasts deserve their own post]

Wise-ass comments aside, this is the year that saw the Huygens land on Saturn, and the founding of the ITER (International Themo-nuclear Experimental Reactor).

More year-wise top breakthroughs from the Beeb(back to 1999's stem-cells breakthrough)
2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999

And Science Mag's what to expect in 2006. Interesting. Very interesting.

National Anthems

Fantastic Resource

Lists past anthems for many countries. A trivia-fans' dream-come-true.

Perhaps the kicker...downloadable MIDI tunes, lyrics (with English translations where applicable, and sheet music for a few...

Indian "Encyclopedia"

Bleeding bio-pirates.

But thankfully enough, these pirates have spurred new action from the Indian government - the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. (sign-up available)

Its about time that the Texmati and Neem-based herbicide patent-holders are put in their places.

But more importantly, it makes available traditional, non-toxic, non-chemical remedies to all of us, at a time when we seem to be living in a chemical soup of food-preservatives and OTC (over-the-counter) drugs.

Organic, Baby. The way to go.

The Golden Quadrilateral

In typical New York Times international columns fashion, a fantastic, yet just a little-bit condescending feature on India's most ambitious infrastructure project to date - The Golden Quadrilateral. A map of this project. A snap-shot of the status, as of the end of September.

For all the condescension that I may have detected in that write-up, I also noticed an under-current of wishful thinking on the part of the writer, that maybe we Indians should not sprint entirely down the exact path that the West has taken and maybe pause, just a bit.