For some couple of days I was noticing the rising inflow of Litchis in the fruit market. But all those litchis are not fully ripe as indicated by their pale and yellowish-red colour. Eventhough I thought them to be sweet enough as their sales seems to be robust.

When I got up today morning, I saw many parrots perching on trees in the garden. At first I thought their presence is because of the mangoes. But next moment, I recalled that my mother had already planned to pluck all the raw mangoes for preparing pickle. So these birds must have came to test the sweet litchis. I immediately went ahead and plucked a litchi fruit from (Read the rest of this story.)

Three weeks back, I was applauding the Govt. plans of providing free Internet services in India [Free Internet In India]. But unfortunately this plan might remain only a distant dream as the pied piper of Union Telecom Ministry Mr. Dayanidhi Maran has recently (Read the rest of this story.)

Last week one of the leading media house in Dehradun viz. Dainik Jagaran gave its name to a small traffic intersection point near its printing press. The traffic joint on Saharanpur Road near New Sabzi Mandi, Niranjanpur was named as “Jagaran Chowk” in the presence of political dignitaries. The inauguration was done by no other than the State Chief Minister Shri B. C. Khanduri. The efforts of the Dainik Jagaran for lending a helping hand to the local traffic police in disciplining and managing the traffic through this was admired by one and all.

But the point to be noted here is that what Dainik Jagaran has done to organise the traffic? It has (Read the rest of this story.)

I was highly delighted when Economic Times greeted me today morning with its first headline as

Broadband may come free in two years

It further said “The government proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-owned telecom service providers BSNL and MTNL.”
(Read the rest of this story.)

Recently in a landmark decision TDSAT (The Telecom Dispute Settlement and Appellate Tribunal) ordered Zee - Turner to share 19 channels with Tata Sky at 50 percent of the declared cable rates. Earlier Zee- Turner had asked Tata Sky to carry all its 32 channels at Rs149.85 per subscriber per month. But Tata Sky wanted to carry only 19 of Zee- Turner’s channels to its subscribers. So it didn’t want to pay for the channels it didn’t want to telecast.

The point here is whether seller decides the price of a product or the purchaser? (Read the rest of this story.)

State Legislative elections are around in Uttarakhand, the place where I live at present. But I don’t have any Voter ID card mandatory for the voting. Seeing an advertisement in the local newspaper, appealing to apply for the card to those who don’t have it, I asked my father (who too don’t have one) whether he would like to apply? He answered “No, I don’t even know the address of the office where it should be applied for. I have seen numerous advertisements appealing for it but not even one which can guide me to get one easily. I don’t want to go from one office to another and look for the concerned officer who is always difficult to find in any Govt. Deptt. Moreover…”, he continued “why should I take pain to do all these at my age? Being a citizen of this country for over sixty years, I expect Government to provide me the Voter ID card at my door step.” And I feel that he is absolutely right in his position. Most other citizens might be having a similar feeling and they opt not to vote rather than being harassed at the hands of the Govt. Officials. And in this age of consumerism, where consumer is treated as a king, every citizen expects a royal treatment everywhere. After all, the principle of democracy states that Citizen herself is the ruler and not the ruled.

Well, what is the principle of democracy for that matter? I, personally, don’t advocate it. Democracy is always in the favour of majority, assuming that the majority is always right! Democracy trusts the collective wisdom of all its adult citizens. But in many cases, majority has proved themselves wrong. Majority will always ignore the extremes of talent at either end. This way the views of the most & least talented minds of the society are rendered useless. Democracy takes into account the interest of majority and ignores the rest. But the people whose opinions are mostly against the majority, losses all the privileges of democracy. Why? Democracy can never support this breed of people. Don’t these people have any right to live according to their will? They are living in this democratic world as second citizens and are deprived of most of the benefits democracy showers upon its primary citizens i.e. majority.

India is the largest democracy of the world. But majority of its citizens are illiterate or poorly educated. When we consider the majority, it is this segment which rules over the better educated breed. Whatever good decisions are taken are on the account of the better educated people who have the additional skills of influencing and thrusting their opinions in the minds of majority. Similarly, there are people at other extreme, who has the additional ability to influence the majority of people. Whatever wrong is done in the society can be credited to these breed. More or less, majority doesn’t has any opinion or initiative of its own and depend on the rest for it. But it has the power to choose whatever it wants to. Its like a blind being asked to choose the best of paintings. Isn’t it?

We need a system where the top breed (though a small part proportionately) is assigned more voting power than the common man and much more than the lowest / ill-talented breed. Can Democracy provide this to our society.

Most of the time I feel, I don’t belong to the school of thought of the majority of the society. And always am at the receiving end of this democracy principle. But if you are among the majority, you will probably discard all these as the junk from some mindless person. You have got every right to do that as you are in majority. But through this, I would like to appeal to all those brilliantly minded persons in minority to consider my opinion towards democracy and devise a better alternative system of governance. Ganatantra is not guna-tantra but ganana-tantra.
(meaning that Republic doesn’t support quality but only quantity.)

Anyways, there is always some discrepancy in each system, atleast we have a system which is better than most others.

WISHING YOU ALL A VERY HAPPY REPUBLIC DAY!

Technorati Tags: Democracy Governance Independence Constitution Republic

You may think what a silly question it is! Every calender, diary and media says that today is the Basant Panchami. Even there is a holiday in several schools, Organizations and in Uttarakhand Govt. Organizations too on account of Basant Panchami.

Today morning when I was trying to get out of my bed at 6 in the morning, my body resisted to expose itself from the warmth of the quilt. Giving in to its demand I stayed there in the bed for another one hour pondering over the above question. When I got up from the bed, the first thing I did was to recheck the calender. But calender was adamant to the fact that it is Basant Panchami today.

Basant Panchami is said to be the best of all seasons, the reetu-raj. It signals the end of extreme cold season and identifies itself with the best of the Nature has to offer. With warmth in sunlight, cool and soothing breeze, blooming sunflowers with butterflies flying around them, the sweet echo of cuckoo from the branches of trees covered with brand new leaves, farm lands ready with their rubi crops of wheat and mustard for harvest, etc. the term “Basant Panchami” brings a kind of magical feeling beside ringing the spirit of festivity. Many poets and literary genius were motivated with this romantic event of the nature. But I din’t get any such feeling within me. Neither I noticed any visible changes in the nature indicating that the Royal King of All Seasons has arrived!

I live in Dehradun which is not far off from epical land of Bal Krishna viz. Brij, Vrindavan or Mathura as far as weather belt is concerned. Even though the advent of Basant Panchami seems to me a bit uncermonious in the peak of winters. We haven’t yet received the normal snow fall of the season and are still waiting for it. And suddenly, it is announced that today is Basant Panchami. Obviously, I was not convinced and still a bit sarcastic about it.

Is it only me who is at fault? It made me to write about it to ask you all. What do you feel. Please be candid.

[This post was written yesterday but due to some tech prob is being posted today.]

It’s been a long time, I haven’t posted anything on this blog. Actually, some of my well-wishers pointed out that I should categorize the posts at the time of writing so that their permalinks remain the same forever. Till this day, all my posts were uncategorized. And this made me stop writing …without a proper category. Good excuse! Isn’t it?

Now the necessity to categorize them has created a new problem for me. I believe in expressing freely without any prior planning about the topic on which I’ll be expressing. I might even carry my discussions through several topics and issues in a single post. Choosing a category before-hand might restrict myself with these privileges! But categorizing have several benefits for my readers. So I finally decided to classify all my writings into some categories.

Being a professional from the field of Yellow Pages, categorizing seems to be an easier part of my job to everyone. But in fact, choosing a right category for every business listing in a yellow pages is not an easy job. It took me several months to decide and group the categories at Century Yellow Pages …and am still unsatisfied with its present structure! All categories here were grouped and regrouped to form a hierarchy of three levels. But after doing this, I felt that some of them needed to be grouped into as far as 5 or 7 levels. Only then it becomes appropriate for those businesses to be meaningfully categorized. Well, for the time being, I have left that job incomplete.

But similarly here, I wish to have categories, its sub-categories and sub-sub categories to classify my writings. I don’t think wordpress provide this facility at the moment. But who knows, someday someone from the wordpress may chance upon this post from my blog and get inspired to add this feature to incorporate the crazy ones like me in their software!

Well, for present, I’ll try my best to put my posts in the category they deserve. Of course, classification will be linear as I don’t write too often . This will make my categorization a bit imperfect …but now after failing in my quest to be perfect, I have started loving to be imperfect. Afterall, perfection is the advanced stage of imperfection and being imperfect is like being a bit human, isn’t it? So atleast this argument and acceptance of being imperfect will put me back on the regular writing. So here I am …back to my postings, urging you all to ignore the categorization part here by and large.

In this times of century, where communications are at lightning speed, I feel sorry for the job done by The Times of India’s team to cover Dehradun.

Although Times of India doesn’t have any special edition for the state of Uttarakhand, but it has a weekly supplement viz. Doon Plus circulated in the Dehradun and Haridwar districts of Uttarakhand, every Saturday. It contains just four pages, most of which are advertisements. The rest carries copies of articles written for other editions which are hardly relevent here. If you pick up the copy of Doon Plus (circulated yesterday), you will find articles with the opening lines like “When 2007 dawns this Monday…” or “The coming Bikex show on 5th January” or “Pragati Maidan in your neighbourhood”. Sometimes words like this prompt me to check the date of the newspaper, I’m reading through. Its obvious that these articles are atleast a week old and are written for the audience of Delhi.

Most of the times, I’d already read the articles printed here in Delhi or in some other editions available online at www.epaper.timesofindia.com .

So in effect they are harrassing me (and other readers) by feeding outdated & irrelevent content and wasting my valuable time!

Instead of an article, there was a sports news item on its front page this week and that too of half page. I dunno how they position their supplements. There must be problems with their editorial team or content logistics, as columnists do their job pretty well. But may God bless them, some of their coloumns come without their names here. e.g. see the coloumn of Jugal Kishore ( I recognised as the photograph is there but not the name) or a coloumn on aquarium (I won’t like to guess who wrote it, as I am not sure this time) in this issue.

Sorry, I am unable to provide you any permalink for you to see as they haven’t yet hosted this edition on their website! Perhaps you may be able to check it later at www.doonplus.com …if you are fortunate enough

I am surprised to learn that they are making this supplement twice-a-week from the next week. Who demanded for it? Surely not the readers like me. Might be their advertisers …as this is the monopolistic English media here in Uttarakhand with no distant competition. People at Times of India should know that readers love better content more than the advertisements. Perhaps they are still learning this lesson.

Might be they are confusing their media with another local paper circulated to Times of India’s readers carrying only advertisements and zero content viz. Dehradun Classified ( www.dehradunclassified.com). As of now, Dehradun Classified’s revenue are many folds higher than the Times of India’s Doon Plus and that too despite of its zero content and lower circulation. Perhaps it has an influence over the strategy of Doon Plus. But there are many factors and reasons influencing this marketing battle. Will write more about this later in a different post.

So far the bad news is that Doon Plus is going twice-a-week and I’m afraid I’ll be fed with the same old, duplicate and irrelevent content more frequently! Is Nilakshi Bhattacharyya listening?

Programmers are a different breed or perhaps they get so involved with their programming that they forget at times why they are doing what they are doing! Programmers program a software to simplify a job. But more often than not, I feel, they rather complicate the job.

Programs should be simple enough for a novice to understand and use them. But most programs are over interactive and keep asking the obvious questions which ought not to be asked and answered. There are so many question boxes to answer for, that it require a voracious reader to read all and precisely answer them to proceed further to another question box!

Perhaps, the programmers are overcautious and overuse the confirmation boxes like whether you would like to exit this file? or would you like to shut down? or would you like to save this file before exiting?, etc. At times programs ask a question without giving any alternative to answer that question in a different way. e.g. I was trying to save a web page while surfing. The program failed to do so and a dialogue box appeared saying the web page you were trying to save was not saved, with the only option to answer was OK. But obviously it wasn’t OK with me. But the programmer mercilessly hasn’t provided any recourse to it!

In Indian culture, it is said to be inauspicious when interferring someone when leaving the home, starting a journey, leaving for work, etc. But programmers always ask ‘would you like to exit?’, ‘Are you sure you want to close this program?’, Do you want it to delete?’,  I think this are the obvious questions which are irritating and could be avoided as no one take them seriously. And these trivials are the real cause for overlook of really serious questions & warnings. All these results in several system crashes or loss of precious files.

If programmers were to program their door bell, there will be a loud voice when you will push their door bell, asking “Are you sure you really wish to push this door bell?”. The day isn’t far away when you will take out your mobile to answer a call, a voice will pop out : “Wouild you really like to answer this call, its from your yelling boss?” I wish programmers will have mercy on us and  won’t over-program our lives. The user always want something very easy to operate. Most programs are loaded with many feature which less than 10% people actually use. But why to trouble or confuse the remaining 90% lot? How many people actually move the menu bar, use special stationaries or opt for extra tools? And how significant or important these features are as compared to the extra time it demands from the user to master them? A novice always pefer to successfully operate and do his job with only the basic features.

The author of “Why Software Sucks …And What You Can Do About It, Mr. David Platt says that Programmers just don’t think like the people who use their products.

The Programmer’s argument is that good programmers are often get overloaded with features demanded by “power users” (die-hard techies) and they end up designing the software as per their demand. But this is not fair.This way they are serving to their own community only!

A product for the masses will be at best nothing but simplistic. So here is the vaccum. Any takers?