Can we learn from South Africans?

"Indian cricket team lacks discipline & attitude" this remark is not made by Rahul Dravid with regards to number of extras conceded in the Hyderabad game against South Africa but the observation made by people who are responsible for the team's arrangements. To these people, It took just few days to unearthed deeper malaise in the Indian team. These are the reasons for above deduction, which were reported in Thursday's issue of Deccan.com

• South African team had regular meetings between 6pm and 7pm. Indian team members went to attend their respective sponsor programs.


• South Africans moved together and ate together but Indian players sat in groups, while having their food. On the match-eve, South Africans had an exclusive team only dinner on the lawns and paid bill themselves.


• South Africans went to bed by 9pm on all days, despite being accompanied by their wifes and girl friends on this tour.

In Friday's newspaper it was reported, that Indians, on reaching Bangalore most of them preferred to take rest and just two players ventured out for practice. All these symptoms show indolent attitude and lack of cohesiveness in their approach. For a team which has been embroiled in controversies, group politics and personal loyalties, it is difficult to overcome them in a night but they should make a beginning, first they need to realize importance of small gestures in nurturing team spirit & discipline, specially when our players come from diverse regions.

No matter who wins this series, Indian players need to learn lot from South Africans. Meticulous routines, team work and devotion towards the game will only bring us close to realizing the world cup dream and not individual talent or fame.

When will we realize our deceitful enemy?

I was expecting some kind of strong response from Indian government after Delhi serial blasts but it appears, that as usual our efforts will be limited to finding terrorists, who perpetrated these blasts and ignoring their affiliated organizations and the country, which gives them all support & free reign to operate in their territory. Every country in this world at least tries to protect their citizens and advises them on impending danger to their lifes but our leadership makes loud noises about their resoluteness in their fight against terrorists but when it comes to hard decision making they are always shallow and reactionary. How many of us know, that there are waging jihad against us? and how serious we are in dealing with this?.

Our peaceniks and Pakistani sympathizers argue that there should not be any hindrance to peace process!. First, i would like to know what is the objective of peace? since there is regular killings & tortures of civilians, attacks on security forces & their installations in J&K and in the rest of the country too, they are continuing their terrorist violence unabated, last major attempt was on Ayodhya. Most importantly Pakistani authority is not even willing to accept the existence of terrorist training camps in territory controlled by them, even after ample proof provided by their own Herald Magazine and also by international agencies and satellite images provided by Indian government, with such dishonest and deceitful enemy how can we expect them to keep their commitments?. Musharraf has done very little in controlling terrorism, after attack on parliament, he had arrested some terrorists and their organization chiefs were put under house arrest but only to be released later, when people's attention shifted from this issue. Now, terrorist organizations were put in the watch list for name sake and given free reign in Pakistan to operate & recruit, as we can see from earth quake relief operations conducted by them with full support from ISI & pakistani establishment.

"We are very disappointed with the government. The mujahideen saved us. I am going to join them next summer since winter has already arrived," he said.

The stench of rotting bodies and the lopsided approach of the Pakistan government has given a fresh lease of life to the jehadi movement. The population of Pakistan occupied Kashmir has developed a soft corner for the jehadis.

The quake has strengthened jehad.

We are generously donating 25 million to pakistan government for providing assistance to quake victims without any accountability, I guess this will be eventually used against us. If we can't choke their support base and counter their propaganda in Pakistan controlled areas then how can we succeed against terrorism?.

Sometimes, it appears to me that our politicians are only serious about terrorism, when there is a direct threat to their lives, such as attack on parliament. There never has been any change in attitude of pakistani government but the change is in our mindset to ignore daily killings of our own people, in hope to encourage peace process.

Yesterday's Events

Yesterday was grievous for two reasons, 1) 111 people had died in a train accident near Valigonda, Andhra Pradesh 2) Around 59 people had died and many others injured in terrorist attacks in New Delhi. Former incident is caused by accident and also due to lack of foresight of railway officials & bit of negligence too, that is, they constructed a bridge which can withstand flooding from one tank only and they haven't thought of the possibility of more than one tank breaching at the same moment. Railway officials had reached accident spot by 6am, when this incident has occurred around 4:30am and only at 8:30am they started shifting injured and it should be noted that at 10:30am, still some people were hanging(literally) to their dear life by holding on to the windows of train, ceiling fans and to the branches of trees so that they won't sweep away in floods.

Later incident is caused by some human animals who had lust for blood!. Afterwards, i will write more about this in another post.

Part 1: Applications which made difference to me.

For me, Reading anything on monitor is laborious task and needless to say, that it puts lot of strain on my eyes, due to glare emitting from the screen. Most importantly, it restricts me from doing any other tasks. All this changed, when i found CoolSpeech approximately 4 years ago, initially i was apprehensive, that it may sound like a robot but my doubt was put to rest when i tried it. It is a program, which reads out text that we copy to clipboard(it holds information between the copy and the paste operations) or it reads loud as we type anything/anywhere. It also does other tasks:

• Scheduling a task, such as, reading from a file(text, docs, Htmls) at a particular time or reading news from internet(using urls) at a particular time etc.


• Converting text file to wave(sound) file.


• Announces time & date (half) hourly in different styles.

It is available with different male & female voices but among them, which sounds exactly like human voice and that i like most is "Adult Male 1, American English".

This program has increased my productivity and this voice has been my companion for countless insane late nights. I still remember, the day i got this program i downloaded Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen from Project Gutenberg site and listened to it nonstop(because i was fascinated with this story, since my school days) and then i had listened to one of my favorite book 'Underground' by Suelette Dreyfus, its a fascinating book must read by everyone, Even if you are not associated with computer world (hacker's in particular). I was so trilled, that i haven't slept for two days without finishing reading (listening) to these 2 books and next i had read all (i think) works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Considering my limited time, without this application i can't follow all blogs that i subscribe to or read journals i'm interested in.

Chess has been part of my life and love. Well this statement should not be interpreted as to think that my playing strength is at Master level but i'm just a club level player but one doesn't need to be a master to enjoy beauty of this game, in which we experience all emotions of life (trust me otherwise people won't stare at 64 squares for more than 6 hours straight). Problem was i didn't had human opponent to play with, i don't like to play with computers because they mathematically calculate moves and no excitement there, which we get, when we play against human. Internet has lot of chess servers, popular among them is ICC and yahoo but ICC is paid one and Yahoo has lot of cheaters and with poor rating calculation algorithm. Finally 5 years ago i found FICS and other than chess, it has many interesting things to offer me, like, channels on various topics to chat and i can meet people from all over the world, with different backgrounds, participating in team tourneys(which lasts months) where i made lot of good friends. Thing is FICS is telnet based server, so in initial days there weren't much options when it came to GUI interface(though there were decent ones like winboard & thief). For this reason, One of the member of FICS 'rraf' has wrote Babaschess and it is more flexible because of its customizability and its complexity has been encapsulated by its simplicity. It has been great help to me. You can see below, screenshot of my screen with Babaschess running. Click on it to enlarge.

Babaschess Screenshot

Appeasement or Honest Change of Heart?

Jammu and Kashmir Council for Rehabilitation of Militancy Victims(JKCRMV) has taken decision to widen their purview to accommodate terrorist dependents. Communist Party of India-Marxist state secretary and legislator Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, who had survived tuesday's terrorist attack has said that:

The destitute families of the killed militants could not live a condemned life. Militants do not take up guns after seeking permission from their families.

Well, Tarigami's association with this news and coincidence of this announcement with terrorist attack on him, wonders me whether they have taken this decision under compulsion to appease terrorists?. If purview of JKCRMV could be extended bit further, lets say to those people, who have lost their livelihood due to terrorism & their violence and struggling to survive, can we include them too?

I don't think following stringent policy as Israel's, which flattens terrorist's house with bulldozer will help us but clubbing families of these terrorist with terrorist victims perhaps causes resentment.

J&K: Amusing Newsreader & Terrorist Attack

Today morning around 11:30am, i was watching NDTV's Hindi news, they were following terrorist attack in J&K. What stuck me is when the newsreader proclaimed that this attack discredits the security forces intelligence, which said that the terrorist training camps across the border were affected in the quake and that 700 terrorist had died. I wondered, how? does he mean that there are no terrorists already present inside J&K (If my memory serves me correct, then i remember army spokesperson saying that approximately there are 2000 terrorists operating in J&K.) or is he implying that those terrorists cross LOC just before they intend to commit terrorist act?. On serious note, This high profile attack may not have carried out without the knowledge of higher command and recent killings in the past few days reveal that the unilateral ceasefire issued by jihadi council to help earthquake victims is sham. Increase in violence only shows their desperateness to conceal losses in POK.

All news channels had given importance to this news & terrorism, it is understandable that this prominence comes from the fact that the Educational Minister Gulam Nabi Lone had lost his life but at the same time we shouldn't forget those 10 lesser souls, who are gruesomely murdered few days ago by these terrorists. At the same time, this should not distract army & administration from providing relief operations to quake victims.

Violence against women

UNFPA State of World Population 2005 report which was released on Wednesday has highlighted some shocking facts(at least for me). Here are some excerpts from a article in Deccan.com.

In India, 70 per cent of married women who have ever experienced domestic violence believe that “wife-beating is justified for at least one reason. Shockingly, 16 per cent of deaths during pregnancy in India have been attributed by the report to domestic violence.

In India, one survey showed women lost an average of seven working days after an incident of violence. The state of women in India was highlighted again in the report on the issue of missing girls.

Worldwide estimate reveals one in five women will be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime; one in three will have been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused, usually by a family member or an acquaintance. Violence is killing and disabling women between the ages of 15-44 as cancer

This observation is not limited to India itself:

Even in a highly-developed society like Canada, a national survey on violence against women reported that 30 per cent of married women has to cease regular activities due to abuse, and 50 per cent of women had to take sick leave from work because of the harm sustained.

This is terrible news for two reasons 1) Acceptance/support to violence among women 2) High percentage of such violence exist in our society, i never thought that the problem is so grave. This emphasizes need to provide education and encouraging women to be financially independent to lead their own life rather than depending on others and they should exhibit zero tolerance to violence. When i think about it more, it comes to my mind that education & financial independence alone cannot reduce this violence against women and we need to bring change in the society and our attitude towards women. We need to have programs in schools for children, which teach about equal rights & respect for each other from tender age. These programs should be designed in such a way that it should discourage any display of superiority complex by males due to their physical strength.