wat's all thE fuk: 2010

Saturday, 27 November 2010

Bifurcation

Today's a wonderful and memorable day in the history of blogging as the omniscient blog of all the "fuk"ing things under and above the sun is bifurcating so as to better reach the targeted audience and fully utilize the brand potential for all markets developing and emerging so as to exert the leverage that we command in the area of all sh*t...

enough of all this fu**ing sh**. i just thought it will be a good idea to "fork" to two different blogs, one catering to the English self and the other to the mother tongue self. For the English rantings this will remain the place to be and for the mother tongue rants i have chosen the following name, എന്നാ-കോപ്പാ which will roughly translate to the same meaning in my mother tongue, as this blog conveys, the only difference being calling someone 'son-of-a-bit**' and 'നായിന്റെ മോനെ'.

as simple as that. if you understand my mother tongue, wouldn't hurt dropping in once in a while @ http://enna-koppaa.blogspot.com/

Sunday, 3 October 2010

chEap labour in india

This is a conversation that occurred among three selves of mine- the sceptic, the politician and the capitalist.

(Prologue) India is a predominantly agriculture economy; not that it contributes much to the major indexes of development like GDP or the BSE index, but because it employs more people than any other sector. When the number of people employed by this industry and the output of this sector are tallied, free market entrepreneurs shudder.

(C): So little from so many and we say we have labour deficit in the cities for all the developmental activities we throw away to these third world pieces of shit. Why don’t these labour resources come to cities and work cheap for us?

(S): But how do we get them work for us? Hmmm, let’s see. They may make the bulk of the food eaten by the well to do cousins in cities; they may sell out their produce for paltry sums to the middlemen and eke out a living;

(P): In actuality the government could not care less. They don’t contribute to the stock markets, they are a bane on the nation by pulling down the per capita income with their substantially low income and their only power of self worth, the voting rights can be bought out once every 5 year for a paltry sum and some empty promises. Let’s drive out some of these scoundrels out of their villages ...

(S): Where they have a decent place to sleep under more equitable and liveable conditions.

(P): ... and bring them to cities. Let’s build dams, umpteen lane highways, mine in their territory so that they can be driven out in the name of the greater common good and nationalism.

(S): But what about our food production and security?

(P): Who cares? We have enough money to buy anything we want. If farmers insist on farming we will make it conducive to produce cash crops which require substantially less labour. Thereby a section of the framers, namely the wealthy cash crop farmers get wealthier and the poor will be driven out to cities for our nation building.

(C): All these worthless beings will then folk to the city and will form the basis for the cheap labour that we've been looking. We will get to pay a lot lesser for them. Maybe we can even manage to pay them lesser than that they used to get in their villages.

(S): But then what about the lowering of per capita income?

(C): Fool, PCI of the developing and powerful middle class will rise faster than the rate at which these scoundrels can bring it down.

(S): But what if someone tries to be a hero?

(P): We have all the tags to assign them, like that of nationalism, patriotism, terrorism - we can always sideline, eliminate or make them irrelevant.

(S): What are the ramifications?

(P): India will continue to grow at double digit growth rates. Our stock markets will continue to rise. More foreign investments will come in.

(C): Using which we can gobble up still more land in the villages and drive out more of these scoundrels to cities from which we can pick and choose cheap labour.

(S): What an idea sirji (sigh)...

Thursday, 30 September 2010

hypocritE

I'm a hypocrite
As I enunciate the morally correct and righteous
Whereas I hardly practice the same
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm an atheist
As I say I don't believe in God and divine interventions
Whereas I go to the nearest God and temple in the vicinity of the slight disturbance
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm a secularist
As I proclaim all the religions the same
Whereas I personally consider my religion the best
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm a liberal
As I proclaim myself to accept all philosophies good or bad without conviction
Whereas I consider all new philosophies as subservient to my beleifs
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm a communist
As all property should be owned and operated by govt
Whereas I may seldom give up my land without a fight
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I love the poor
As I blame the govt and the rich for the plight of the poor
Whereas the sight of a begger loses my appetite
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm a feminist
As women are socially, politically and economically capable as men
Whereas I consider women only equal to themselves
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm intelligent
As I write a poem with supposedly intellectual gibberish
Whereas I know how stupid and shitty this looks
Hence I'm a hypocrite

Sunday, 12 September 2010

minimalizE/trim down your firEfox browsEr

Are you a firefox fan?

Do you love the Google chrome interface for its sleek and minimalistic interface but love Firefox for its openness and functionality?

That's the case with me.

So I decided to trim down Firefox by removing the unnecessary elements from the browser and increase the screen real estate. After some help from the net and some configuration file edits, this is how my Firefox looks like.

So here's how;

Open Chrome and the first thing you notice is the absence of a Title bar. I wonder what this screen hogging useless crap does which is none in particular. For this, the plethora of Firefox extensions come in handy. Download and install the "Hide Caption Titlebar Plus" add-on for Firefox and voila your title bar is gone. With a few adjustments on the add-on options you can opt to hide the title bar of all your Firefox windows and pop-ups.

You might have seen the three toolbar- menu, navigation and bookmarks. What I did was to drag all the buttons from bookmarks and navigation bar into the menu bar. You can do this by right clicking any of the toolbar and opting for "Customize". From the customize window, you can add/remove and move all of Firefox buttons, address bar, search bar and other elements to wheresoever you wish. Once all the components were moved to Menu bar, hide the navigation and bookmarks bar. This can be done by unchecking these toolbar from View->Toobars->.

After doing the above steps you may find the address bar and search bar too small. For this I came across another solution. The menu bar, which has all the File, Edit, View, History and miscellaneous menus are seldom used in the course of a normal browsing session. So why not compress this into a single menu button, which when clicked displays the menus? For this after some search I came across another addon- "Tiny Menu". Install this add-on and all your menus are compressed into a menu button. A great savings in screen estate. This is how it looks like;

Another element which eats up my screen is the status bar. But removing this? That's tricky. I wouldn't know what's the status when a web-page loads and neither would i be able to see if a link is pointing to some ad site. For this too the solution came in the form of another add-on, "autoHideStatusBar". This is exactly the stuff I was looking for- it will hide the status bar whenever there is some activity whose status needs to be shown- like loading of a web-page. This has also configurable options to show the link when the mouse is hovered over hyperlink for some time.

This is how the status bar will look like when the page is loading;

And this is how it will look like after the page loads;

That's how I saved my Firefox from falling prey to Chrome.
At the end of the day, a comparison of Chrome and Firefox seems reasonable and FF is no longer a spendthrift of your valuable pixels.

Sunday, 18 July 2010

intErnEt, cEnsorship, frEE markEt & frEEdom

Through the mainstream media, we are told that China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and the likes are states that restrict freedom of expression through censorship and limits freedom of expression. On the other side we have the free world which mainly comprises of the US and the Europe where we have unlimited freedom, choice and the entire freedoms one could possibly imagine. I would have taken these down just like any other life in the "Matrix" had I not taken the red pill once in a while. This time it was an article that came in the IEEE Communications Magazine written by none other than Richard Stallman. It had startling revelations which I would like to broadcast with GPL and fair use permissions from Stallman.

The So-Called Free World

1. Let’s start with China (although not a "free" state), where the government plans to Identify and photograph everyone that uses an Internet cafe. ⁽¹⁾

2. Some of the cell phones can be activated by remote command to listen to the user's conversations without giving any sign of listening, by the police⁽²⁾ and by unauthorized individuals.⁽³⁾

3. The European Union mandates keeping record of all phone calls and emails for periods of up to two years.

4. Your cell phone can be used to locate your position by triangulation to amazing accuracies.

5. Denmark’s government has blocked access to a secret list of web pages. Australia’s government plans to follow suit but has met strong resistance, so instead it has forbidden links to a long list of URLs. Australia now says it will sensor access to a secret list of foreign sites starting this year. ⁽⁴⁾

6. Electronic Frontiers Australia was forced under the threat of fines of AUD 11,000 per day to remove a link to an anti-abortion political web site.

7. India has announced a broad plan of censorship that would effectively abolish freedom of the press on the Internet. ⁽⁵⁾

8. In the United States, people have been imprisoned as “terrorists” for running a website which discussed actions taken against experiments on animals.

9. Microsoft Windows has features to spy on the user⁽⁶⁾, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) features designed to stop the user from making full use of his own files⁽⁷⁾, and an all purpose back door with which Microsoft can forcibly change the software in any way at any time⁽⁸⁾. Microsoft can alter any software, not just its own.⁽⁹⁾

10. In 2009, Amazon remotely commanded the erasure of all the copies of 1984, by George Orwell, that users had bought from Amazon. ⁽¹⁰⁾

11. The French government recently passed a law (HADOPI) to abolish the principle of due process of a law, by punishing Internet users with disconnection on the mere accusation of copying. Although this law is not in effect, United Kingdom has proposed such a law too.

12. Canada reluctantly published a list of suggestions it received from private parties, and HADOPI style punishment without trial was one of them. ⁽¹¹⁾

When the so called democratic and developed countries pursue such forms of censorship, intolerance and restriction of ‘fundamental’ rights, who are they to blame countries like Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, china and the likes of press censorship and restriction of freedom ? It will be sheer hypocrisy and nothing else. It’s nothing new that the developed countries are becoming more and more plutocratic and authoritarian. When George Orwell wrote “1984”, he had in mind the closed structure of some of the communist nations. But whatever the free world doubted and feared in the communist ages of post World War 2, is in their backyards.

References:

Friday, 30 April 2010

how far arE wE from thE Matrix???

When I saw the movie “Matrix” for the first time I couldn’t fully comprehend the fine idea embedded in it. It took me multiple viewings to fully envision what the Wachowski brothers were trying to say. Even then at that time, I never thought this could become a reality; not that now I think it will become a reality in the near future. But the way things are shaping up I'm beginning to realize that I cannot fully dismiss that notion.

My biggest doubt against a successful Matrix was that how a computer based network can understand and replicate the complex social, physiological and emotional thoughts with an even bigger amount of randomness in such a way those human beings will seldom know when they are in a dream and when they are out of it. More recent advancements in the field of science, technology and the "Internet" have exponentially reduced this chasm between reality and computational psychology.

In this connected world as more and more people are logging in and all their thoughts, actions and interactions are published for anyone’s and everyone’s taking, it becomes too easy to predict and replicate someone’s thoughts and actions. For an illustrative example take a look at Google Inc and at the technologies they are developing. They started off with the innocuous search engine and later diversified into various other technologies. Everybody is aware of the apparent uses of these technologies, but I will add a few more phrases to bring out the concealed and nefarious for which this could be used.

Search engine	Omniscience. Grab all the worlds’ knowledge so that it could be used in Matrix for deductive reasoning and research.
Mail	Learn about one's social/professional network, what/when/how they are doing in their personal and professional life.
Calendar	How people organise their lives and how they spend their time
Documents	Access to people's private documents
Orkut	Map out one’s friends, who they know, how they know, what do they do
Picasa	What/when/where have they been/seen and who else they spend their time with.
Groups	Find out people's interests, hobbies, affiliations
Youtube	Understand/control what they see for infotainment
Blogger	Direct access to your thoughts and whatever otherwise repressed emotions.
Android Mobile Platform	Track where you are (using mobile based triangulation), find who you talk to, what you say, and what you see
Books	Condense and archive the world’s written knowledge
Desktop search	Access to whatever documents that you have not put up on the net
Google talk	Whatever you say and chat with your friends

Socrates ones said, “Tell me who your friends are I will tell you who you are”. With all this tools and the other multitude of stuff like Twitter, Facebook etc your life is for anyone’s reading. How so ever you try the connection between your private, unexposed and unconnected life with the connected one is rapidly increasing. There are such intelligent search engines like Wolfram Alpha which aims to find and almost figures out answer to intelligent questions.

Once all the blanks are filled-in, in the future, at the end of your every online connection there may appears a completely intelligent system which will be able to replicate any human behaviour. The distance to Matrix from there will be very short and fast.

Sunday, 28 March 2010

a hard choicE

As the sun climbed the skies, over my head and a little further to the other side, i lay in contemplation in my tonsillitis-induced-fever-antidote-medicine-induced lucid dream, i was thinking what every man,woman or child in my position at that time would think of; food. i was cleverly moving my checker pieces across the various mains and crosses of my locality in search of that place that would have the honor of quenching my "thirst" for food. as they say, dreams last only a few minutes when we actually have dreamed about ages passing by; since the decision was made in a lucid dream it took me only a few minutes. not because i outsourced that work to compress-years-to-minutes phenomena of dreams but because the choice was limited.

if i take a left stepping out of my abode, i would see a Bombay chat center, of course the noon choice is not chat. then what else do they have - they have parotta, biriyani, chicken biriyani, fish biriyani, egg biriyani, and what-not-else-biriyani, as if they were all different dishes (if they are different, then i will say 5 polar bears and their parents make up 15 kinds of animals in north pole). if i go further left, i would reach a place where they are supposed to serve food from my home state and has a name synonymous with a food storage. but the horrid taste of that food (i know them better), which made me puke the last time i had it, immediately forced my legs to take the right turn from my house instead. and there i was walking that hot stretch of road to some Andhra restaurant on the way (another state-eatery where i tried my luck yesterday, was as horrendous as always). on the way I saw a pizza hut delivery boy whoosh by. that made me thinking about the so called food connoisseurs paradise; Bangalore. In reality Bangalore is a paradise for people who cant recognize taste or food. either you have the posh star hotels with all the fancy roof high priced cuisines and all-you-can-eat buffets or you have the mediocre darshinis, sagars and messes that bloat the place with the same kind of food. if your idea of different dish is 4 kinds of sambhar prepared in 4 different ways, i wouldn't blame you- you are made for India by India. people here are so traditional even with food - they cant taste anything different on which they were bought up. vegetarians remain so their entire life eating rice, curd, rasam and papad their whole life not out of choice but out of compulsions and the way they are bought up; the marginally better non vegetarians get to eat chicken as part of biriyani or as kebab and remain chikki-tarians or eggi-tarians.

i know the choice in Bangalore is limited because i was out of this shit-hole thank God, for once. I've been to Dallas,Tx for almost 3 months where i was almost alone and i didn't felt it because each days food was its own adventure and a discovery. a varied cuisine there means having a platter of Japanese, Chinese, Indian, American, English, Mediterranean, Italian, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Thai and everything under the sun that's imaginable. i was not limited by beef or pork, in fact i first tasted pork in my life during this stint in the US. the barbecued pork that my uncle served me was so delicious that i almost ate a pound of it. and i had the opportunity to taste turkey and cranberry on the foodie day of the hemisphere, "Thanks Giving". the sheer kanjiness of the Indian cannot be described better when some people I know who where in other parts of the world (not India) were busy preparing the usual "kanji" for their breakfast, lunch and dinner. Oh God, thanks for delivering me from those predicaments.

i would give anything to have such a choice here. that's why even though a little hard on the valet, i enjoy going to places like Pizza Hut, Thulps (these guys in Koramangala have the best beef burger in Bangalore) or Barbecue Nation once in a while. to many of my friends who were seeing Bangalore for the first time i remark, the only choice for a real food connoisseur in Bangalore is whether to have it or not.

PS: i know and recognize that for a lot many Indians, having some kind of food is a choice of yes or no; my views are harsh transgressions upon the reality faced by many of my countrymen. in no way do i mean to hurt their feelings; all i want is a nation where everybody can worry about the cuisine rather than about the yes/no aspect. I AM A HYPOCRITE!!!

Saturday, 27 March 2010

India is a SupErpowEr! Huh? u mEan rEd Indians? Part-3

The third and last part of a myth-busting.

Finally the political power which is more of a soft power or rather a soft skill. I think it is developed more as a combination of the previous two powers. A nation with no military or economic power cannot exert any political influence; although strategically used it can deliver more than it promises. The power that Cuba exerts in the World or atleast amongst its neigbors is a wonderful example. Political power is the soft power which we exert through diplomatic and international decisions which can turn the tide in our favor. I don’t see when we have ever applied a well thought about political decision since the Nehruvian days. But even then political blunders committed by Nehru ensured that Kashmir will always be a sore point in all international matters pertaining to India and Pakistan. Also his Hindi-Cheeni bhai bhai rhetoric was no hindrance to the Chinese juggernaut in its path for attaining what the dragon wanted. When it loses its decision making powers to external influence we loose our political power too. We kindly bend down to any pressure point in international relations and deliver others what they want. We always fail to see what India as a nation wants in the long run. Politicians are ready to sell their nations for petty political interests. We shrug off our economic might just as an elephant does not understand its might. The e way in which we favored American companies in all agreements with them, by limiting their liability in case of nuclear accidents, the immunity with which Dow chemicals and its subsidiaries still continue to operate in India, a non-aligned nation like India providing support for a nation (that too almost a military base for them in Indian territory) that was altmost single handedly responsible for all major world conflicts after Second world war and the conversion of this country to almost that of a dominion of the United States; I wonder with who/what the allegiance of the political elite of India lays.

And as long as we remain so dumb and driven by short term political and vanity reasons we never stand to make it in this world as any kind of superpower. And we Indians sooner realize the fact the sooner will be out of this matrix of illusion.

Saturday, 6 March 2010

India is a SupErpowEr! Huh? u mEan rEd Indians? Part-2

Part 2 of a myth-busting.

In the olden days, military might should have augmented all other short comings but in the present, omnipotence comes closely associated with Economic might. Concept of an economic superpower emerged during the the renaissance period and gathered steam during the industrial revolution. Nations were looking for lucrative markets for selling the excess goods churned out because of the improved productivity bought along by the industrial revolution and also to buy cheaper raw materials for their industries. Britain emerged the clear winner during this period as it laid its hands on vast portions of territories all over the world and fortified these holdings with its military and cunning. That kind of economic might saw a change after the World wars with the US emerging a clear winner as European economies were shattered and US economy soared by selling war to both sides. Americas, with its abundant natural resources, a daring political leadership guided mostly by capitalist interests and the only strong economy after the WWII, made sure that it will create a new economic order in the world on the basis of dollar.

And it sure did and managed to keep that up so for the next 60 years or so. Even though it shows signs of weakness, there is no sight of a threatening force in the near future. To keep up this economic might they sure did use the military as well. Not long back American companies were in the forefront rummaging through the new nations and amassing profits. The treasury bonds purchased by the Asian tigers and the Dragon nation further enabled it to rise upon a credit based economy. The importance of oil changed the dynamics of the economics with US exerting all the influence it can over the OPEC to sell oil in dollars, which it just had to print up and other nations just bought it. In those countries where communism and leftism showed resilience against market forces, the US showed its economic and military might so as to scare off competition or to change even the rulers of democracies. After all democracies became just another name of a channel for capitalism. The economic might also served to buy off entire nations so that capitalism could thrive in them. And sure they did succeed. Well, for those who matters, it did.

To ask the obvious, where do we figure in this field? We have come a long way from those times; when the US gave us food grains in grant, when we had to sell bullion in the international market to sustain our imports, when our forex reserves came down all the way to $1 billion; to one of the largest producers of food grains, more than $300 billion of forex reserves and the fourth largest holder of dollar and ready to buy back gold from the IMF. But does these make us a so called economic superpower? We ourselves assign that term to us taking pride in the new found purchasing power of the great India middle class. It’s true we have huge remittances from our NRIs; we have a large export industry (although the import-export deficits are still on the darker side) and the purchasing power of the average Indian is said to be higher than say 20 years back. But what can we do with this economic might?

Power matters only as long as it is used; the muscle to flex and make other nations act to your will without resorting to arms. As a matter of fact the economic powerhouse status that other national leaders bestow on us is the power of the worlds biggest market for selling goods and services. Sure that's a power; that's the only power we have. But are we going to utilize that? When are we going to ask things to move our way when we have the power to do so? The pathetic state we are in is clearly depicted by our affairs in this realm. We are not able to influence even our neighbors to buy from us, we are ready to open up our markets, banking and insurance system and whatever we can without even the slightest compulsion or need. We allow foreign banks to work freely in India when our own State Bank has been denied permission to operate in areas with vast migrant Indian population. We have to push over selves to a corner and limit the liability of American companies in case of a nuclear accident (and with Bhopal like tragedies and the kind of treatment the victims have been receiving, i doubt whether there is any liability for a foreign company operating in India). We want to open our markets just for the sake of opening it up. We should seriously think where the priorities of our policy makers and the bureaucrats is. It’s as if we are selling ourselves to the bidders, rather than be the bidder in other world economies. Our hold on the SAARC countries itself is loosening.

China is flexing its economic power by influencing even India’s neighbors and surrounding us and choking us. We are still too complacent to do anything proactive. We take pride in our economics by stating that if we wanted we can reduce America to nothing by recalling our engineers and scientists (I laugh myself out of my senses) and all the [crappy meager] software that we produce [for foreign companies]. We fail to realize that our software power is only an illusion. It’s the foreign corporates that are still running the business and we are just tools. If they want they can make Mexicans or Chinese or Africans to do the same thing. As long as we don’t flex the economic muscle its useless. After all brains is all that matters and only if it is used. For our politicians the philosophy seems to be that of the cancer cell - growth for the sake of growth.

(to be continued)

Saturday, 27 February 2010

India is a SupErpowEr! Huh? u mEan rEd Indians?

Part 1 of a myth-busting.

There is a widespread illusion of super prowess in the Indian nation, primarily among the India middle class which can be attributed to the economic growth they have seen in the past decade or so. I believe this illusion began appearing somewhere during the reign of the Vajpayee lead BJP coalition at the center during the latter half of last decade of 20th century. The trigger should be considered as the Pokhran blasts and the associated nationalist rhetoric put up by the BJP (which apparently failed them in the next elections). Apart from this, the middle class saw their standard of living rise and the nation witnessed the IT boom and the rise of India as a software powerhouse (the illusion of Indian Software power will come later). This Pokhran lead nuclear "surge" and the associated economic burgeoning lead the news media to put out the superpower rhetoric; which the Indian middle class readily believed just as anyone would believe that there are a billion galaxies each with a billion stars in it. With the spread of computers and emails and social networking; mails spread around the web educating the children of the great Indian middle class that they are living in a Utopian super power society. We are taught to be proud of our scientific history, our nuclear capabilities, our great military and many other factors like number of Indians heading multinationals, Indians forming a considerable force at NASA, Microsoft filled with Indians and so forth. I believe there is a generation of Indians who think that its just our self restraint that keeps other countries from bowing down to us.

But are we really so? Who is a superpower in the current world context? I think there are three main categories according to which super powers can be called so - military, economic, political.

First and foremost military super power - the best example being the USA. They are the most powerful military in the whole world in terms of combat expert, effectiveness and technology. They take risks like no one else so as to attain whatever ends that their masters at the White house and the Pentagon want them to. In any conventional or non-conventional form of war fare (lets rule out nuclear weapons); there is no contention as to who will emerge the winner. After the second world war we have seen a lot of their military greatness in action all over the world - from covert ops in the Latin Americas to conventional warfare in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq to tactical warfare in the Balkans and the Russian union; apart from a few failures they were mostly success (as far as the myopic eye goes). That stature has not changed or even shows any sign of change as far as the immediate future is considered. So as far as the military might goes, USA is the sole superpower with no parallel. And where does India figure in all this? We are still the second largest army (fueled and filled in by the large population and poverty), who has seen no major victories apart from some costly endeavors against an ill equipped Pakistan. We were no match for the Chinese or the small terrorist outfit LTTE. An army that has hardly seen any combat duty after 1971 Bangladesh endeavor and the nuisance (it was made out into a war, because it sounds great) that was Kargil (that was costly for the army with almost 1 soldier killed for every 2 infiltrator; but not that costly considering the gargantuan size of the army and the money made by the politicos buying coffins for the bravest of Indians). We still marvel at the sight of refurbished aircraft carriers purchased from Russian scrap dealers (figure of speech). Our Navy has seen hardly any combat duty apart from foiling some piracy attempts and capturing Somali pirates/. Air force is no better with a large fleet of aging and rusting aircraft peeling off mid-air and the infamous flying coffins (Mig 21). During the Kargil conflict politicians strictly wanted no crossing of the LOC, not because of the moral superiority but because they were fully aware that if some insurgents can bring down a few Indian aircraft, the better equipped Pakistani military can bring down the whole of it, if it crosses the border. To suffice, India is hardly in any position to flex its military muscle to coerce any nation to follow its will and therefore it is hardly any superpower in this context. Let us be content with keeping peace in African and eastern European countries and after all that’s what we all want.

(to be continued...)