About a week back Jio launched a laptop called JioBook that will be manufactured in China

The most interesting thing is that the whole thing will be produced in Hunan, China. Then 3 days later India mandates a licensing requirement for Apple, Dell and other laptop/tablet manufacturers. And all of these in the guise of Make in India . It is similar how India has exempted Adani and the Tatas from buying as much solar cells as are needed and then sell the same in India. Reliance will be basically monopolizing the laptop business. And if people think that projects like Raspberry Pi, Arduino etc. will be exempted they have another think coming.

History of License Raj After India became free, in the 1980s the Congress wanted to open its markets to the world just like China did. But at that time, the BJP, though small via Jan Sangh made the argument that we are not ready for the world. The indian businessman needs a bit more time. And hence a compromise was made. The compromise was simple. Indian Industry and people who wanted to get anything from the west, needed a license. This was very much in line how the Russian economy was evolving. All the three nations, India, China and Russia were on similar paths. China broke away where it opened up limited markets for competition and gave state support to its firms. Russia and Japan on the other hand, kept their markets relatively closed. The same thing happened in India, what happened in Russia and elsewhere. The businessman got what he wanted, he just corrupted the system. Reliance, the conglomerate today abused the same system as much as it could. Its defence was to be seen as the small guy. I wouldn t go into that as that itself would be a big story in itself. Whatever was sold in India was sold with huge commissions and just like Russia scarcity became the order of the day. Monopolies flourished and competition was nowhere. These remained till 1991 when Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh was forced to liberalize and open up the markets. Even at that time, the RSS through its Swadeshi Jagran Manch was sharing the end of the world prophecies for the Indian businessman.

2014 Current Regime In 2010, in U.K. the Conservative party came in power under the leadership of David Cameron who was influenced by the policies of Margaret Thatcher who arguably ditched manufacturing in the UK. David Cameron and his party did the same 2010 onwards but for public services under the name austerity. India has been doing the same. The inequality has gone up while people s purchasing power has gone drastically down. CMIE figures are much more drastic and education is a joke.

Add to that since 2016 funding for scientists have gone to the dogs and now they are even playing with doctor s careers. I do not have to remind people that a woman scientist took almost a quarter century to find a drug delivery system that others said was impossible. And she did it using public finance. Science is hard. I have already shared in a previous blog post how it took the Chinese 20 years to reach where they are and somehow we think we will be able to both China and Japan. Of the 160 odd countries that are on planet earth, only a handful of countries have both the means and the knowledge to use and expand on that. While I was not part of Taiwan Debconf, later I came to know that even Taiwan in many ways is similar to Japan in the sense that a majority of its population is stuck in low-paid jobs (apart from those employed in TSMC) which is similar to Keiretsu or Chabeol from either Japan or South Korea. In all these cases, only a small percentage of the economy is going forward while the rest is stagnating or even going backwards. Similar is the case in India as well Unlike the Americans who chose the path to have more competition, we have chosen the path to have more monopolies. So even though, I very much liked Louis es project sooner or later finding the devices itself would be hard. While the recent notification is for laptops, what stops them from doing the same with mobiles or even desktop systems. As it is, both smartphones as well as desktop systems has been contracting since last year as food inflation has gone up. Add to that availability of products has been made scarce (whether by design or not, unknown.) The end result, the latest processor launched overseas becomes the new thing here 3-4 years later. And that was before this notification. This will only decrease competition and make Ambanis rich at cost of everyone else. So much for east of doing business . Also the backlash has been pretty much been tepid. So what I shared will probably happen again sooner or later. The only interesting thing is that it s based on Android, probably in part due to the issues people seeing in both Windows 10, 11 and whatnot. Till later. Update :- The print tried a decluttering but instead cluttered the topic. While what he shared all was true, and certainly it is a step backwards but he didn t need to show how most Indians had to go to RBI for the same. I remember my Mamaji doing the same and sharing afterwards that all he had was $100 for a day which while being a big sum was paltry if you were staying in a hotel and were there for company business. He survived on bananas and whatver cheap veg. he could find then. This is almost 35-40 odd years ago. As shared the Govt. has been doing missteps for quite sometime now. The print does try to take a balanced take so it doesn t run counter of the Government but even it knows that this is a bad take. The whole thing about security is just laughable, did they wake up after 9 years. And now in its own wisdom it apparently has shifted the ban instead from now to 3 months afterwards. Of course, most people on the right just applauding without understanding the complexities and implications of the same. Vendors like Samsung and Apple who have made assembly operations would do a double-think and shift to Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico anywhere. Global money follows global trends. And such missteps do not help

Implications in A.I. products One of the things that has not been thought about how companies that are making A.I. products in India or even MNC s will suffer. Most of them right now are in stealth mode but are made for Intel or AMD or ARM depending upon how it works for them. There is nothing to tell if the companies made their plea and was it heard or unheard. If the Government doesn t revert it then sooner or later they would either have to go abroad or cash out/sell to somebody else. Some people on the right also know this but for whatever reason have chosen to remain silent. Till later

Manipur Lot of news from Manipur. Seems the killings haven t stopped. In fact, there was a huge public rally in support of the rapists and murderers as reported by Imphal Free Press. The Ruling Govt. both at the Center and the State being BJP continuing to remain mum. Both the Internet shutdowns have been criticized and seems no effect on the Government. Their own MLA was attacked but they have chosen to also be silent about that. The opposition demanded that the PM come in both the houses and speak but he has chosen to remain silent. In that quite a few bills were passed without any discussions. If it was not for the viral videos nobody would have come to know of anything . Internet shutdowns impact women disproportionately as more videos of assaults show Of course, as shared before that gentleman has been arrested under Section 66A as I shared in the earlier blog post. In any case, in the last few years, this Government has chosen to pass most of its bills without any discussions. Some of the bills I will share below. The attitude of this Govt. can be seen through this cartoon

The above picture shows the disqualified M.P. Rahul Gandhi because he had asked what is the relationship between Adani and Modi. The other is the Mr. Modi, the Prime Minister who refuses to enter and address the Parliament. Prem Panicker shares how we chillingly have come to this stage when even after rapes we are silent

Data Leakage According to most BJP followers this is not a bug but a feature of this Government. Sucheta Dalal of Moneylife shared how the data leakage has been happening at the highest levels in the Government. The leakage is happening at the ministerial level because unless the minister or his subordinate passes a certain startup others cannot come to know. As shared in the article, while the official approval may take 3-4 days, within hours other entities start congratulating. That means they know that the person/s have been approved.While reading this story, the first thought that immediately crossed my mind was data theft and how easily that would have been done. There was a time when people would be shocked by articles such as above and demand action but sadly even if people know and want to do something they feel powerless to do anything

PAN Linking and Aadhar Last month GOI made PAN Linking to Aadhar a thing. This goes against the judgement given by the honored Supreme Court in September 2018. Around the same time, Moneylife had reported on the issue on how the info. on Aadhar cards is available and that has its consequences. But to date nothing has happened except GOI shrugging. In the last month, 13 crore+ users of PAN including me affected by it I had tried to actually delink the two but none of the banks co-operated in the same Aadhar has actually number of downsides, most people know about the AEPS fraud that has been committed time and time again. I have shared in previous blog posts the issue with biometric data as well as master biometric data that can and is being used for fraud. GOI either ignorant or doesn t give a fig as to what happens to you, citizen of India. I could go on and on but it would result in nothing constructive so will stop now

IRCv3 I had been enthused when I heard about IRCV3. While it was founded in 2016, it sorta came on in its own in around 2020. I did try matrix or rather riot-web and went through number of names while finally setting on element. While I do have the latest build 1.11.36 element just hasn t been workable for me. It is too outsized, and occupies much more real estate than other IM s (Instant Messengers and I cannot correct size it like I do say for qbittorrent or any other app. I had filed couple of bugs on it but because it apparently only affects me, nothing happened afterwards But that is not the whole story at all. Because of Debconf happening in India, and that too Kochi, I decided to try out other tools to see how IRC is doing. While the Debian wiki page shares a lot about IRC clients and is also helpful in sharing stats by popcounter ( popularity-contest, thanks to whoever did that), it did help me in trying two of the most popular clients. Pidgin and Hexchat, both of which have shared higher numbers. This might be simply due to the fact that both get downloaded when you install the desktop version or they might be popular in themselves, have no idea one way or the other. But still I wanted to see what sort of experience I could expect from both of them in 2023. One of the other things I noticed is that Pidgin is not a participating organization in ircv3 while hexchat is. Before venturing in, I also decided to take a look at oftc.net. Came to know that for sometime now, oftc has started using web verify. I didn t see much of a difference between hcaptcha and gcaptcha other than that the fact that they looked more like oil paintings rather than anything else. While I could easily figure the odd man out or odd men out to be more accurate, I wonder how a person with low or no vision would pass that ??? Also much of our world is pretty much contextual based, figuring who the odd one is or are could be tricky. I do not have answers to the above other than to say more work needs to be done by oftc in that area. I did get a link that I verified. But am getting ahead of the story. Another thing I understood that for some reason oftc is also not particpating in ircv3, have no clue why not :(I

Account Registration in Pidgin and Hexchat This is the biggest pain point in both. I failed to register via either Pidgin or Hexchat. I couldn t find a way in either client to register my handle. I have had on/off relationships with IRC over the years, the biggest issue being IIRC is that if you stop using your handle for a month or two others can use it. IIRC, every couple of months or so, irc/oftc releases the dormant ones. Matrix/Vector has done quite a lot in that regard but that s a different thing altogether so for the moment will keep that aside. So, how to register for the network. This is where webchat.oftc.net comes in. You get a quaint 1970 s IRC window (probably emulated) where you call Nickserv to help you. As can be seen it one of the half a dozen bots that helps IRC. So the first thing you need to do is /msg nickserv help what you are doing is asking nickserv what services they have and Nickserv shares the numbers of services it offers. After looking into, you are looking for register /msg nickerv register Both the commands tell you what you need to do as can be seen by this

Let s say you are XYZ and your e-mail address is xyz@xyz.com This is just a throwaway id I am taking for the purpose of showing how the process is done. For this, also assume your passowrd is 1234xyz;0x something like this. I have shared about APG (Advanced Password Generator) before so you could use that to generate all sorts of passwords for yourself. So next would be /msg nickserv register 1234xyz;0x xyz@xyz.com Now the thing to remember is you need to be sure that the email is valid and in your control as it would generate a link with hcaptcha. Interestingly, their accessibility signup fails or errors out. I just entered my email and it errors out. Anyway back to it. Even after completing the puzzle, even with the valid username and password neither pidgin or hexchat would let me in. Neither of the clients were helpful in figuring out what was going wrong. At this stage, I decided to see the specs of ircv3 if they would help out in anyway and came across this. One would have thought that this is one of the more urgent things that need to be fixed, but for reasons unknown it s still in draft mode. Maybe they (the participants) are not in consensus, no idea. Unfortunately, it seems that the participants of IRCv3 have chosen a sort of closed working model as the channel is restricted. The only notes of any consequence are being shared by Ilmari Lauhakangas from Finland. Apparently, Mr/Ms/they Ilmari is also a libreoffice hacker. It is possible that their is or has been lot of drama before or something and that s why things are the way they are. In either way, doesn t tell me when this will be fixed, if ever. For people who are on mobiles and whatnot, without element, it would be 10x times harder. Update :- Saw this discussion on github. Don t see a way out It seems I would be unable to unable to be part of Debconf Kochi 2023. Best of luck to all the participants and please share as much as possible of what happens during the event.

Manipur Videos Warning: The text might be mature and will have references to violence so if there are kids or you are sensitive, please excuse. Few days back, saw the videos and I cannot share the rage, shame and many conflicting emotions that were going through me. I almost didn t want to share but couldn t stop myself. The woman in the video were being palmed, fingered, nude, later reportedly raped and murdered. And there have been more than a few cases. The next day saw another video that showed beheaded heads, and Kukis being killed just next to their houses. I couldn t imagine what those people must be feeling as the CM has been making partisan statements against them. One of the husbands of the Kuki women who had been paraded, fondled is an Army Officer in the Indian Army. The Meiteis even tried to burn his home but the Army intervened and didn t let it get burnt. The CM s own statement as shared before tells his inability to bring the situation out of crisis. In fact, his statement was dumb stating that the Internet shutdown was because there were more than 100 such cases. And it s spreading to the nearby Northeast regions. Now Mizoram, the nearest neighbor is going through similar things where the Meitis are not dominant. The Mizos have told the Meitis to get out. To date, the PM has chosen not to visit Manipur. He just made a small 1 minute statement about it saying how the women have shamed India, an approximation of what he said.While it s actually not the women but the men who have shamed India. The Wire has been talking to both the Meitis, the Kukis, the Nagas. A Kuki women sort of bared all. She is right on many counts. The GOI while wanting to paint the Kukis in a negative light have forgotten what has been happening in its own state, especially its own youth as well as in other states while also ignoring the larger geopolitics and business around it. Taliban has been cracking as even they couldn t see young boys, women becoming drug users. I had read somewhere that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 young person in Afghanistan is now in its grip. So no wonder,the Taliban is trying to eradicate and shutdown drug use among it s own youth. Circling back to Manipur, I was under the wrong impression that the Internet shutdown is now over. After those videos became viral as well as the others I mentioned, again the orders have been given and there is shutdown. It is not fully shut but now only Govt. offices have it. so nobody can share a video that goes against any State or Central Govt. narrative A real sad state of affairs Update: There is conditional reopening whatever that means When I saw the videos, the first thing is I felt was being powerless, powerless to do anything about it. The second was if I do not write about it, amplify it and don t let others know about it then what s the use of being able to blog

Mental Health, Binging on various Webseries Both the videos shocked me and I couldn t sleep that night or the night after. it. Even after doing work and all, they would come in unobtrusively in my nightmares While I felt a bit foolish, I felt it would be nice to binge on some webseries. Little I was to know that both Northshore and Alaska Daily would have stories similar to what is happening here While the story in Alaska Daily is fictional it resembles very closely to a real newspaper called Anchorage Daily news. Even there the Intuit women , one of the marginalized communities in Alaska. The only difference I can see between GOI and the Alaskan Government is that the Alaskan Government was much subtle in doing the same things. There are some differences though. First, the State is and was responsive to the local press and apart from one close call to one of its reporters, most reporters do not have to think about their own life in peril. Here, the press cannot look after either their livelihood or their life. It was a juvenile kid who actually shot the video, uploaded and made it viral. One needs to just remember the case details of Siddique Kappan. Just for sharing the news and the video he was arrested. Bail was denied to him time and time again citing that the Police were investigating . Only after 2 years and 3 months he got bail and that too because none of the charges that the Police had they were able to show any prima facie evidence. One of the better interviews though was of Vrinda Grover. For those who don t know her, her Wikipedia page does tell a bit about her although it is woefully incomplete. For example, most recently she had relentlessly pursued the unconstitutional Internet Shutdown that happened in Kashmir for 5 months. Just like in Manipur, the shutdown was there to bury crimes either committed or being facilitated by the State. For the issues of livelihood, one can take the cases of Bipin Yadav and Rashid Hussain. Both were fired by their employer Dainik Bhaskar because they questioned the BJP MP Smriti Irani what she has done for the state. The problems for Dainik Bhaskar or for any other mainstream media is most of them rely on Government advertisements. Private investment in India has fallen to record lows mostly due to the policies made by the Centre. If any entity or sector grows a bit then either Adani or Ambani will one way or the other take it. So, for most first and second generation entrepreneurs it doesn t make sense to grow and then finally sell it to one of these corporates at a loss GOI on Adani, Ambani side of any deal. The MSME sector that is and used to be the second highest employer hasn t been able to recover from the shocks of demonetization, GST and then the pandemic. Each resulting in more and more closures and shutdowns. Most of the joblessness has gone up tremendously in North India which the Government tries to deny. The most interesting points in all those above examples is within a month or less, whatever the media reports gets scrubbed. Even the firing of the journos that was covered by some of the mainstream media isn t there anymore. I have to use secondary sources instead of primary sources. One can think of the chilling effects on reportage due to the above. The sad fact is even with all the money in the world the PM is unable to come to the Parliament to face questions.

The above poster/question is by Surya Pratap Singh, a retired IAS officer. He asks why the PM is unable to answer in either of the houses. As shared before, the Govt. wants very limited discussion. Even yesterday, the Lok Sabha TV just showed the BJP MP s making statements but silent or mic was off during whatever questions or statements made by the opposition. If this isn t mockery of Indian democracy then I don t know what is Even the media landscape has been altered substantially within the last few years. Both Adani and Ambani have distributed the media pie between themselves. One of the last bastions of the free press, NDTV was bought by Adani in a hostile takeover. Both Ambani and Adani are close to this Goverment. In fact, there is no sector in which one or the other is not present. Media houses like Newsclick, The Wire etc. that are a fraction of mainstream press are where most of the youth have been going to get their news as they are not partisan. Although even there, GOI has time and again interfered. The Wire has had too many 504 Gateway timeouts in the recent months and they had been forced to move most of their journalism from online to video, rather Youtube in order to escape both the censoring and the timeouts as shared above. In such a hostile environment, how both the organizations are somehow able to survive is a miracle. Most local reportage is also going to YouTube as that s the best way for them to not get into Govt. censors. Not an ideal situation, but that s the way it is. The difference between Indian and Israeli media can be seen through this

The above is a Screenshot shared by how the Israeli media has reacted to the Israeli Government s Knesset over the judicial overhaul . Here, the press itself erodes its own by giving into the Government day and night

Binging on Webseries Saw Northshore, Three Pines, Alaska Daily and Doogie Kamealoha M.D. which is based on Doogie Howser M.D. Of the four, enjoyed Doogie Kamealoha M.D. the most but then it might be because it s a copy of Doogie Howser, just updated to the new millenia and there are some good childhood memories associated with that series. The others are also good. I tried to not see European stuff as most of them are twisted and didn t want that space.

EU Digital Operational Resilience Act and impact on FOSS Few days ago, apparently the EU shared the above Act. One can read about it more here. This would have more impact on FOSS as most development of various FOSS distributions happens in EU. Fair bit of Debian s own development happens in Germany and France. While there have been calls to make things more clearer, especially for FOSS given that most developers do foss development either on side or as a hobby while their day job is and would be different. The part about consumer electronics and FOSS is a tricky one as updates can screw up your systems. Microsoft has had a huge history of devices not working after an update or upgrade. And this is not limited to Windows as they would like to believe. Even apple seems to be having its share of issues time and time again. One would have hoped that these companies that make billions of dollars from their hardware and software sales would be doing more testing and Q&A and be more aware about security issues. FOSS, on the other hand while being more responsive doesn t make as much money vis-a-vis the competitors. Let s take the most concrete example. The most successful mobile phone having FOSS is Purism. But it s phone, it has priced itself out of the market. A huge part of that is to do with both economies of scale and trying to get an infrastructure and skills in the States where none or minimally exists. Compared that to say Pinepro that is manufactured in Hong Kong and is priced 1/3rd of the same. For most people it is simply not affordable in these times. Add to that the complexity of these modern cellphones make it harder, not easier for most people to be vigilant and update the phone at all times. Maybe we need more dumphones such as Light and Punkt but then can those be remotely hacked or not, there doesn t seem to be any answers on that one. I haven t even seen anybody even ask those questions. They may have their own chicken and egg issues. For people like me who have lost hearing, while I can navigate smartphones for now but as I become old I don t see anything that would help me. For many an elderly population, both hearing and seeing are the first to fade. There doesn t seem to be any solutions targeted for them even though they are 5-10% of any population at the very least. Probably more so in Europe and the U.S. as well as Japan and China. All of them are clearly under-served markets but dunno a solution for them. At least to me that s an open question.

RISC -V Motherboard, SBC While I didn t want to, a part of me is hyped about this motherboard. This would probably be launched somewhere in November. There are obvious issues in this, the first being unlike regular motherboards you wouldn t be upgrade as you would do.You can t upgrade your memory, can t upgrade the CPU (although new versions of instructions could be uploaded, similar to BIOS updates) but as the hardware is integrated (the quad-core SiFive Performance P550 core complex) it would really depend. If the final pricing is around INR 4-5k then it may be able to sell handsomely provided there are people to push and provide support around it. A 500 GB or 1 TB SSD coupled with it and a cheap display unit and you could use it anywhere although as the name says it s more for tinkering as the name suggests. Another board that could perhaps be of more immediate use would be the beagleboard. They launched the same couple of days back and called it Beagle V-Ahead. Again, costs are going to be a concern. Just a year before the pandemic the Beagleboard Black (BB) used to cost in the sub 4k range, today it costs 8k+ for the end user, more than twice the price. How much Brexit is to be blamed for this and how much the Indian customs we would never know. The RS Group that is behind that shop is head-quartered in the UK. As said before, we do not know the price of either board as it probably will take few months for v-ahead to worm its way in the Indian market, maybe another 6 months or so. Even so, with the limited info. on both the boards, I am tilting more towards the other HiFive one. We should come to know about the boards say in 3-5 months of time.

CHIPS Act I had shared about the Chips Act a few times here as well as on SM. Two articles do tell how the CHIPS Act 2023 is more of a political tool, an industrial defence policy rather than just business as most people tend to think.

Cancelation of Books, Books Burning etc. Almost 2400 years ago, Plato released his work called Plato s Republic and one of the seminal works within it is perhaps one of the most famous works was the Allegory of the Cave. That is used again and again in a myriad ways, mostly in science-fiction though and mostly to do with utopian, dystopian movies, webseries etc. I did share how books are being canceled in the States, also a bit here. But the most damning thing has happened throughout history, huge quantities of books burned almost all for politics But part of it has been neglect as well as this time article shares. What we have lost and continue to lose is just priceless. Every book has a grain of truth in it, some more, some less but equally enjoyable. Most harmful is the neglect towards books and is more true today than any other time in history. Kids today have a wide variety of tools to keep themselves happy or occupied, from anime, VR, gaming the list goes on and on. In that scenario, how the humble books can compete. People think of Kindle but most e-readers like Kindle are nothing but obsolescence by design. I have tried out Kindle a few times but find it a bit on the flimsy side. Books are much better IMHO or call me old-school. While there are many advantages, one of the things that I like about books is that you can easily put yourself in either the protagonist or the antagonist or somewhere in the middle and think of the possible scenarios wherever you are in a particular book. I could go on but it will be a blog post or two in itself. Till later. Happy Reading.

Update:Manipur Extremely horrifying visuals, articles and statements continue to emanate from Manipur. Today, 19th July 2023, just couple of hours back, a video surfaced showing two Kuki women were shown as stripped, naked and Meitei men touching their private parts. Later on, we came to know that this was in response of a disinformation news spread by the Meitis of few women being raped although no documentary evidence of the same surfaced, no names nothing. While I don t want to share the video I will however share the statement shared by the Kuki-Zo tribal community on that. The print gives a bit more context to what has been going on.

Update, Few hours later : The Print also shared more of a context about six days ago. The reason we saw the video now was that for the last 2.5 months Manipur was in Internet shutdown so those videos got uploaded now. There was huge backlash from the Twitter community and GOI ordered the Manipur Police to issue this Press Release yesterday night or just few hours before with yesterday s time-stamp.

IndianExpress shared an article that does state that while an FIR had been registered immediately no arrests so far and this is when you can see the faces of all the accused. Not one of them tried to hide their face behind a mask or something. So, if the police wanted, they could have easily identified who they are. They know which community the accused belong to, they even know from where they came. If they wanted to, they could have easily used mobile data and triangulation to find the accused and their helpers. So, it does seem to be attempt to whitewash and protect a certain community while letting it prey on the other. Another news that did come in, is because of the furious reaction on Twitter, Youtube has constantly been taking down the video as some people are getting a sort of high more so from the majoritarian community and making lewd remarks. Twitter has been somewhat quick when people are making lewd remarks against the two girl/women. Quite a bit of the above seems like a cover-up. Lastly, apparently GOI has agreed to having a conversation about it in Lok Sabha but without any voting or passing any resolutions as of right now. Would update as an when things change. Update: Smriti Irani, the Child and Development Minister gave the weakest statement possible

As can be noticed, she said sexual assault rather than rape. The women were under police custody for safety when they were whisked away by the mob. No mention of that. She spoke to the Chief Minister who has been publicly known as one of the provocateurs or instigators for the whole thing. The CM had publicly called the Kukus and Nagas as foreigners although both of them claim to be residing for thousands of years and they apparently have documentary evidence of the same . Also not clear who is doing the condemning here. No word of support for the women, no offer of intervention, why is she the Minister of Child and Women Development (CDW) if she can t use harsh words or give support to the women who have gone and going through horrific things Update : CM Biren Singh s Statement after the video surfaced

This tweet is contradictory to the statements made by Mr. Singh couple of months ago. At that point in time, Mr. Singh had said that NIA, State Intelligence Departments etc. were giving him minute to minute report on the ground station. The Police itself has suo-moto (on its own) powers to investigate and apprehend criminals for any crime. In fact, the Police can call for questioning of anybody in any relation to any crime and question them for upto 48 hours before charging them. In fact, many cases have been lodged where innocent persons have been framed or they have served much more in the jail than the crime they are alleged to have been committed. For e.g. just a few days before there was a media report of a boy who has been in jail for 3 years. His alleged crime, stealing mere INR 200/- to feed himself. Court doesn t have time to listen to him yet. And there are millions like him. The quint eloquently shares the tale where it tells how both the State and the Centre have been explicitly complicit in the incidents ravaging Manipur. In fact, what has been shared in the article has been very true as far as greed for land is concerned. Just couple of weeks back there have been a ton of floods emanating from Uttarakhand and others. Just before the flooding began, what was the CM doing can be seen here. Apart from the newspapers I have shared and the online resources, most of the mainstream media has been silent on the above. In fact, they have been silent on the Manipur issue until the said video didn t come into limelight. Just now, in Lok Sabha everybody is present except the Prime Minister and the Home Minister. The PM did say that the law will take its own course, but that s about it. Again no support for the women concerned. Update: CJI (Chief Justice of India) has taken suo-moto cognizance and has warned both the State and Centre to move quickly otherwise they will take the matter in their own hand.

Update: Within 2 hours of the CJI taking suo-moto cognizance, they have arrested one of the main accused Heera Das

The above tells you why the ban on Internet was put in the first place. They wanted to cover it all up. Of all the celebs, only one could find a bit of spine, a bit of backbone to speak about it, all the rest mum

Just imagine, one of the women is around my age while the young one could have been a daughter if I had married on time or a younger sister for sure. If ever I came face to face with them, I just wouldn t be able to look them in the eye. Even their whole whataboutery is built on sham. From their view Kukis are from Burma or Burmese descent. All of which could be easily proved by DNA of all. But let s leave that for a sec. Let s take their own argument that they are Burmese. Their idea of Akhand Bharat stretches all the way to Burma (now called Myanmar). They want all the land but no idea with what to do with the citizens living on it. Even after the video, the whataboutery isn t stopping, that shows how much hatred is there. And not knowing that they too will be victim of the same venom one or the other day Update: Opposition was told there would be a debate on Manipur. The whole day went by, no debate. That s the shamelessness of this Govt. Update 20th July 19:25 Center may act or not act against the perpetrators but they will act against Twitter who showed the crime. Talk about shooting the messenger

We are now in the last stage. In 2014, we were at 6

Ayisha After a long time I saw a movie that I enjoyed wholeheartedly. And it unexpectedly touched my heart. The name of the movie is Ayisha. The first frame of the movie itself sets the pace where we see Ayisha (Manju Warrier) who decides to help out a gang as lot of women were being hassled. So she agrees to hoodwink cops and help launder some money. Then she is shown to work as a maid for an elite Arab family. To portray a Muslim character in these polarized times really shows guts especially when the othering of the Muslim has been happening 24 7. In fact, just few days back I was shocked to learn that Muslim homes were being marked as Jews homes had been marked in the 1930 s. Not just homes but also businesses too. And after few days in a total hypocritical fashion one of the judges says that you cannot push people to buy or not buy from a shop. This is after systemically doing the whole hate campaign for almost 2 weeks. What value the judge s statements are after 2 weeks ??? The poison has already seeped in But I m drifting from the topic/movie.

The real fun of the movie is the beautiful relationship that happens between Ayisha and Mama, she is the biggest maternal figure in the house and in fact, her command is what goes in the house. The house or palace which is the perfect description is shown as being opulent but not as rich as both Mama and Ayisha are, spiritually and emotionally both giving and sharing of each other. Almost a mother daughter relationship, although with others she is shown as having a bit of an iron hand. Halfway through the movie we come to know that Ayisha was also a dramatist and an actress having worked in early Malayalam movies. I do not want to go through all the ups and downs as that is the beauty of the movie and it needs to be seen for that aspect. I am always sort of in two worlds where should I promote a book or series or movie or not because most of the time it is the unexpected that works. When we have expectation it doesn t. Avatar, the Way of the Water is an exception, not many movies I can recall like that where I had expectations and still the movie surpassed it. So maybe go with no expectations at all

Manju Warrier Manju Warrier should actually be called Manju Warrior as she chose to be with the survivor rather than the sexism that is prevalent in the Malayalam film industry which actually is more or less a mirror of Bollywood and society as whole. These three links should give enough background knowledge as to what has been happening although I m sure my Malayalam friends would more than add to that knowledge whatever may be missing. In quite a few movies, the women are making inroads without significant male strength. Especially Manju s movies have no male lead for the last few movies. Whether that is deliberate part on Manju or an obstacle being put in front of her. Anyone knows that having a male lead and a female lead enriches the value of a movie quite a bit. This doesn t mean one is better than the other but having both enriches the end product, as simple as that. This is sadly not happening. Having POSH training and having an ICC is something that each organization should look forward for. It s kind of mandatory need of hour, especially when we have young people all around us. I am hopeful that people who are from Kerala would shed some more background light on what has been happening.

Books I haven t yet submitted an application for Debconf. But my idea is irrespective of whether or not I m there, I do hope we can have a library where people can donate books and people can take away books as well. A kind of circular marketplace/library where just somebody notes what books are available. Even if 100 odd people are coming to Debconf that easily means 100 books of various languages. That in itself would be interesting and to see what people are reading, wanting to discuss etc. We could even have readings. IIRC, in 2016 we had a children s area, maybe we could do some readings from some books to children which fuels their imagination. Even people like me who are deaf would be willing to look at excerpts and be charmed by them. For instance, in all my forays of fantasy literature except for Babylon Steel I haven t read one book that has a female lead character and I have read probably around 100 odd fantasy books till date. Not a lot but still to my mind, is a big gap as far as literature is concerned. How would more women write fantasy if they don t have heroes to look forward to :(. Or maybe I may be missing some authors and characters that others know and I do not. Do others feel the same or this question hasn t even been asked ??? Dunno. Please let me know.

Debutsav So apparently Debutsav is happening 2 days from now. While I did come to know about it few days back I had to think whether I want to apply for this or apply for Debconf as I physically, emotionally can t do justice to both even though they are a few months apart. I wish all the best for the attendees as well as presenters sharing all the projects and hopefully somebody shares at least some of the projects that are presented there so we may know what new projects or softwares to follow or whatever. Till later.

Just a few days back we came to know about the horrific Train Crash that happened in Odisha (Orissa). There are some things that are known and somethings that can be inferred by observance. Sadly, it seems the incident is going to be covered up . Some of the facts that have not been contested in the public domain are that there were three lines. One loop line on which the Goods Train was standing and there was an up and a down line. So three lines were there. Apparently, the signalling system and the inter-locking system had issues as highlighted by an official about a month back. That letter, thankfully is in the public domain and I have downloaded it as well. It s a letter that goes to 4 pages. The RW is incensed that the letter got leaked and is in public domain. They are blaming everyone and espousing conspiracy theories rather than taking the minister to task. Incidentally, the Minister has three ministries that he currently holds. Ministry of Communication, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEIT), and Railways Ministry. Each Ministry in itself is important and has revenues of more than 6 lakh crore rupees. How he is able to do justice to all the three ministries is beyond me The other thing is funds both for safety and relaying of tracks has been either not sanctioned or unutilized. In fact, CAG and the Railway Brass had shared how derailments have increased and unfulfilled vacancies but they were given no importance In fact, not talking about safety in the recently held Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session) tells you how much the Govt. is serious about safety. In fact, most of the programme was on high speed rail which is a white elephant. I have shared a whitepaper done by RW in the U.S. that tells how high-speed rail doesn t make economic sense. And that is an economy that is 20 times + the Indian Economy. Even the Chinese are stopping with HSR as it doesn t make economic sense. Incidentally, Air Fares again went up 200% yesterday. Somebody shared in the region of 20k + for an Air ticket from their place to Bangalore Coming back to the story itself. the Goods Train was on the loopline. Some say it was a little bit on the outer, some say otherwise, but it is established that it was on the loopline. This is standard behavior on and around Railway Stations around the world. Whether it was in the Inner or Outer doesn t make much of a difference with what happened next. The first train that collided with the goods train was the 12864 (SMVB-HWH) Yashwantpur Howrah Express and got derailed on to the next track where from the opposite direction 12841 (Shalimar- Bangalore) Coramandel Express was coming. Now they have said that around 300 people have died and that seems to be part of the cover-up. Both the trains are long trains, having between 23 odd coaches each. Even if you have reserved tickets you have 80 odd people in a coach and usually in most of these trains, it is at least double of that. Lot of money goes to TC and then above (Corruption). The Railway fares have gone up enormously but that s a question for perhaps another time . So at the very least, we could be looking at more than 1000 people having died. The numbers are being under-reported so that nobody has to take responsibility. The Railways itself has told that it is unable to identify 80% of the people who have died. This means that 80% were unreserved ticket holders or a majority of them. There have been disturbing images as how bodies have been flung over on tractors and whatnot to be either buried or cremated without a thought. We are in peak summer season so bodies will start to rot within 24-48 hours No arrangements made to cool the bodies and take some information and identifying marks or whatever. The whole thing being done in a very callous manner, not giving dignity to even those who have died for no fault of their own. The dissent note also tells that a cover-up is also in the picture. Apparently, India doesn t have nor does it feel to have a need for something like the NTSB that the U.S. used when it hauled both the plane manufacturer (Boeing) and the FAA when the 737 Max went down due to improper data collection and sharing of data with pilots. And with no accountability being fixed to Minister or any of the senior staff, a small junior staff person may be fired. Perhaps the same official that actually told them about the signal failures almost 3 months back There were and are also some reports that some jugaadu /temporary fixes were applied to signalling and inter-locking just before this incident happened. I do not know nor confirm one way or the other if the above happened. I can however point out that if such a thing happened, then usually a traffic block is announced and all traffic on those lines are stopped. This has been the thing I know for decades. Traveling between Mumbai and Pune multiple times over the years am aware about traffic block. If some repair work was going on and it wasn t able to complete the work within the time-frame then that may well have contributed to the accident. There is also a bit muddying of the waters where it is being said that one of the trains was 4 hours late, which one is conflicting stories. On top of the whole thing, they have put the case to be investigated by CBI and hinting at sabotage. They also tried to paint a religious structure as mosque, later turned out to be a temple. The RW says done by Muslims as it was Friday not taking into account as shared before that most Railway maintenance works are usually done between Friday Monday. This is a practice followed not just in India but world over. There has been also move over a decade to remove wooden sleepers and have concrete sleepers. Unlike the wooden ones they do not expand and contract as much and their life is much more longer than the wooden ones. Funds had been marked (although lower than last few years) but not yet spent. As we know in case of any accident, it is when all the holes in cheese line up it happens. Fukushima is a great example of that, no sea wall even though Japan is no stranger to Tsunamis. External power at the same level as the plant. (10 meters above sea-level), no training for cascading failures scenarios which is what happened. The Days mini-series shares some but not all the faults that happened at Fukushima and the Govt. response to it. There is a difference though, the Japanese Prime Minister resigned on moral grounds. Here, nor the PM, nor the Minister would be resigning on moral grounds or otherwise :(. Zero accountability and that was partly a natural disaster, here it s man-made. In fact, both the Minister and the Prime Minister arrived with their entourages, did a PR blitzkrieg showing how concerned they are. Within 50 hours, the lines were cleared. The part-time Railway Minister shared that he knows the root cause and then few hours later has given the case to CBI. All are saying, wait for the inquiry report. To date, none of the accidents even in this Govt. has produced an investigation report. And even if it did, I am sure it will whitewash as it did in case of Adani as I had shared before in the previous blog post. Incidentally, it is reported that Adani paid off some of its debt, but when questioned as to where they got the money, complete silence on that part :(. As can be seen cover-up after cover-up FWIW, the Coramandel Express is known as the Migrant train so has a huge number of passengers, the other one which was collided with is known as sick train as huge number of cancer patients use it to travel to Chennai and come back

Demonetization 2.0 Few days back, India announced demonetization 2.0. Surprised, don t be. Apparently, INR 2k/- is being used for corruption and Mr. Modi is unhappy about it. He actually didn t like the INR 2k/- note but was told that it was needed, who told him we are unaware to date. At that time the RBI Governor was Mr. Urjit Patel who didn t say about INR 2k/- he had said that INR 1k/- note redesigned would come in the market. That has yet to happen. What has happened is that just like INR 500/- and INR 1k/- note is concerned, RBI will no longer honor the INR 2k/- note. Obviously, this has made our neighbors angry, namely Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan etc. who do some trading with us. 2 Deccan herald columns share the limelight on it. Apparently, India wants to be the world s currency reserve but doesn t want to play by the rules for everyone else. It was pointed out that both the U.S. and Singapore had retired their currencies but they will honor that promise even today. The Singapore example being a bit closer (as it s in Asia) is perhaps a bit more relevant than the U.S. one. Singapore retired the SGD $10,000 as of 2014 but even in 2022, it remains as legal tender. They also retired the SGD $1,000 in 2020 but still remains legal tender.

So let s have a fictitious example to illustrate what is meant by what Singapore has done. Let s say I go to Singapore, rent a flat, and find a $1000 note in that house somewhere. Both practically and theoretically, I could go down to any of the banks, get the amount transferred to my wallet, bank account etc. and nobody will question. Because they have promised the same. Interestingly, the Singapore Dollar has been pretty resilient against the USD for quite a number of years vis-a-vis other Asian currencies. Most of the INR 2k/- notes were also found and exchanged in Gujarat in just a few days (The PM and HM s state.). I am sure you are looking into the mental gymnastics that the RW indulge in :(. What is sadder that most of the people who try to defend can t make sense one way or the other and start to name-call and get personal as they have nothing else

Disability questions dropped in NHFS-6 Just came to know today that in the upcoming National Family Health Survey-6 disability questions are being dropped. Why is this important. To put it simply, if you don t have numbers, you won t and can t make policies for them. India is one of the worst countries to live if you are disabled. The easiest way to share to draw attention is most Railway platforms are not at level with people. Just as Mick Lynch shares in the UK, the same is pretty much true for India too. Meanwhile in Europe, they do make an effort to be level so even disabled people have some dignity. If your public transport is sorted, then people would want much more and you will be obligated to provide for them as they are citizens. Here, we have had many reports of women being sexually molested when being transferred from platform to coach irrespective of their age or whatnot The main takeaway is if you do not have their voice, you won t make policies for them. They won t go away but you will make life hell for them. One thing to keep in mind that most people assume that most people are disabled from birth. This may or may not be true. For e.g. in the above triple Railways accidents, there are bound to be disabled people or newly disabled people who were healthy before the accident. The most common accident is road accidents, some involving pedestrians and vehicles or both, the easiest is Ministry of Road Transport data that says 4,00,000 people sustained injuries in 2021 alone in road mishaps. And this is in a country where even accidents are highly under-reported, for more than one reason. The biggest reason especially in 2 and 4 wheeler is the increased premium they would have to pay if in an accident, so they usually compromise with the other and pay off the Traffic Inspector. Sadly, I haven t read a new book, although there are a few books I m looking forward to have. People living in India and neighbors please be careful as more heat waves are expected. Till later.

India Press Freedom Just about a week back, India again slipped in the Freedom index, this time falling to 161 out of 180 countries. The RW again made lot of noise as they cannot fathom why it has been happening so. A recent news story gives some idea. Every year NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) puts out its statistics of crimes happening across the country. The report is in public domain. Now according to report shared, around 40k women from Gujarat alone disappeared in the last five years. This is a state where BJP has been ruling for the last 30 odd years. When this report became viral, almost all national newspapers the news was censored/blacked out. For e.g. check out newindianexpress.com, likewise TOI and other newspapers, the news has been 404. The only place that you can get that news is in minority papers like siasat. But the story didn t remain till there. While the NCW (National Commission of Women) pointed out similar stuff happening in J&K, Gujarat Police claimed they got almost 39k women back. Now ideally, it should have been in NCRB data as an addendum as the report can be challenged. But as this news was made viral, nobody knows the truth or false in the above. What BJP has been doing is whenever they get questioned, they try to muddy the waters like that. And most of the time, such news doesn t make to court so the party gets a freebie in a sort as they are not legally challenged. Even if somebody asks why didn t Gujarat Police do it as NCRB report is jointly made with the help of all states, and especially with BJP both in Center and States, they cannot give any excuse. The only excuse you see or hear is whataboutism unfortunately

Profiteering on I.T. Hardware I was chatting with a friend yesterday who is an enthusiast like me but has been more alert about what has been happening in the CPU, motherboard, RAM world. I was simply shocked to hear the prices of motherboards which are three years old, even a middling motherboard. For e.g. the last time I bought a mobo, I spent about 6k but that was for an ATX motherboard. Most ITX motherboards usually sold for around INR 4k/- or even lower. I remember Via especially as their mobos were even cheaper around INR 1.5-2k/-. Even before pandemic, many motherboard manufacturers had closed down shop leaving only a few in the market. As only a few remained, prices started going higher. The pandemic turned it to a seller s market overnight as most people were stuck at home and needed good rigs for either work or leisure or both. The manufacturers of CPU, motherboards, GPU s, Powersupply (SMPS) named their prices and people bought it. So in 2023, high prices remained while warranty periods started coming down. Governments also upped customs and various other duties. So all are in hand in glove in the situation. So as shared before, what I have been offered is a 4 year motherboard with a CPU of that time. I haven t bought it nor do I intend to in short-term future but extremely disappointed with the state of affairs

AMD Issues It s just been couple of hard weeks apparently for AMD. The first has been the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) issue that was shown by couple of security researchers. From what is known, apparently with $200 worth of tools and with sometime you can hack into somebody machine if you have physical access. Ironically, MS made a huge show about TPM and also made it sort of a requirement if a person wanted to have Windows 11. I remember Matthew Garett sharing about TPM and issues with Lenovo laptops. While AMD has acknowledged the issue, its response has been somewhat wishy-washy. But this is not the only issue that has been plaguing AMD. There have been reports of AMD chips literally exploding and again AMD issuing a somewhat wishy-washy response. Asus though made some changes but is it for Zen4 or only 5 parts, not known. Most people are expecting a recession in I.T. hardware this year as well as next year due to high prices. No idea if things will change, if ever

CAT-6 patch cord & ONU Few months back I was offered a fibre service. Most of the service offering has been using Chinese infrastructure including the ONU (Optical Network Unit). Wikipedia doesn t have a good page on ONU hence had to rely on third-party sites. FS (a name I don t really know) has some (good basic info. on ONU and how it s part and parcel of the whole infrastructure. I also got an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) but it seems to be very basic and mostly dumb. I used the old CAT-6 cable ( a decade old) to connect them and it worked for couple of months. Had to change it, first went to know if a higher cable solution offered themselves. CAT-7 is there but not backward compatible. CAT-8 is the next higher version but apparently it s expensive and also not easily bought. I did quite a few tests on CAT-6 and the ONU and it conks out at best 1 mbps which is still far better than what I am used to. CAT-8 are either not available or simply too expensive for home applications atm. A good summary of CAT-8 and what they stand for can be found here. The networking part is hopeless as most consumer facing CPU s and motherboards don t even offer 10 mbps, so asking anything more is just overkill without any benefit. Which does bring me to the next question, something that I may do in a few months or a year down the road. Just to clarify they may say it is 100 mbps or even 1 Gbps but that s plain wrong.

AMD APU, Asus Motherboard & Dealerships I had been thinking of an AMD APU, could wait a while but sooner or later would have to get one. I got quoted an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G with an Asus A320 Motherboard for around 14k which kinda looked steep to me. Quite a few hardware dealers whom I had traded, consulted over years simply shut down. While there are new people, it s much more harder now to make relationships (due to deafness) rather than before. The easiest to share which was also online was pcpartpicker.com that had an Indian domain now no longer available. The number of offline brick and mortar PC business has also closed quite a bit. There are a few new ones but it takes time and the big guys have made more of a killing. I was shocked quite a bit. Came home and browsed a bit and was hit by this. Both AMD and Intel PC business has taken a beating. AMD a bit more as Intel still holds part of the business segment as traditionally been theirs. There have been proofs and allegations of bribing in the past (do remember the EU Antitrust case against Intel for monopoly) but Intel s own cutting corners with the Spectre and Meltdown flaws hasn t helped its case, nor the suits themselves. AMD on the other hand under expertise of Lisa Su has simply grown strength by strength. Inflation and Profiteering by other big companies has made the outlook for both AMD and Intel a bit lackluster. AMD is supposed to show Zen5 chips in a few days time and the rumor mill has been ongoing. Correction Not few days but 2025. Personally, I would be happy with maybe a Ryzen 5600G with an Asus motherboard. My main motive whenever I buy an APU is not to hit beyond 65 TDP. It s kinda middle of the road. As far as what I could read this year and next year we could have AM4+ or something like those updates, AM5 APU s, CPU s and boards are slated to be launched in 2025. I did see pcpricetracker and it does give idea of various APU prices although have to say pcpartpicker was much intuitive to work with than the above. I just had my system cleaned couple of months so touchwood I should be able to use it for another couple of years or more before I have to get one of these APU s and do hope they are worth it. My idea is to use that not only for testing various softwares but also delve a bit into VR if that s possible. I did read a bit about deafness and VR as well. A good summary can be found here. I am hopeful that there may be few people in the community who may look and respond to that. It s crucial.

TRAI-caller, Privacy 101& Element. While most of us in Debian and FOSS communities do engage in privacy, lots of times it s frustrating. I m always looking for videos that seek to share that view why Privacy is needed by individuals and why Governments and other parties hate it. There are a couple of basic Youtube Videos that does explain the same quite practically.

Now why am I sharing the above. It isn t that people do not privacy and how we hold it dear. I share it because GOI just today blocked Element. While it may be trivial for us to workaround the issues, it does tell what GOI is doing. And it still acts as if surprised why it s press ranking is going to pits. Even our Women Wrestlers have been protesting for a week to just file an FIR (First Information Report) . And these are women who have got medals for the country. More than half of these organizations, specifically the women wrestling team don t have POSH which is a mandatory body supposed to be in every organization. POSH stands for Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace. The gentleman concerned is a known rowdy/Goon hence it took almost a week of protest to do the needful I do try not to report because right now every other day we see somewhere or the other the Govt. curtailing our rights and most people are mute Signing out, till later

For those who can t see the above poster says the following A handful of retired Supreme Court judges who are part of Anti-India and are trying to make Indian judiciary play role of the Opposition party. Law Minister Kiren Rijiju. Now, just to give bit more of a context, the above has happened as the CJI (Chief Justice has not been listening or toeing their line) The above is a statement given by CJI DY Chandrachud. He says and I quote Democracy needs truth to survive. Democracy and truth go hand in hand. Speaking truth to power is a right of every citizen in a democracy. It is equally a duty.

Another quote by him. I am personally averse to sealed covers. There has to be transparency in Court. This is about implementing the orders. What can be secrecy here. Now I need to again give context of the various statements given. The law minister who gave this statement, his name incidentally came first under the radar sometime in 2013-2014 in a list given/shared by Union Home Secretary R K Singh (then in UPA, now in BJP) as an anti-India China sympathizer. Of course today all sorts of thugs use the brand nationalism he is one of them. Now as far as the CJI is concerned, AFAIK I know he bent over backwards for them but they were not pleased with him. The latest sealed cover statement is because BJP wanted to put a sealed cover in the ongoing Udhav Thackeray vs Eknath Shinde case where BJP or the Eknath Shinde faction tried to give a sealed cover. The problem with sealed cover is for any defence there is nothing to fight against it. It could be a blank paper, it could be whole lot of gossip or innuendo, unless it s out in the open the prosecution in this case i.e. Udhav Thackeray team could not effectively fight as they do not know the contents of the said sealed cover. This goes against all judicial norms. The U.S. tried with sealed cover and ended the practise only after couple of cases. Even in the OROP case (One Rank One Pension) the Govt. tried the same trick. As I have shared before, this actually comes Senator Joseph Mccarthy who started this whole thing in 1950 s, a bit of background on him. I probably had shared about him before but it bears to know and remember again and again. The same is what Mr. Trump has done time and again. It s a similar script. Bully your opponents and use sealed cover as no questions can be asked about it. The good news though is that the views of CJI have been changing. So, yes they would like to change the CJI, they actually have been trying to have their own man have keys to the judiciary but without success so far, soon though this bastion would also fall, if not today then tomorrow. The EC (Election Commission) has been thoroughly compromised. Would not share more as that EC s bending acts would use a whole blog post or two to share the numerous instances where BJP has been given all rights. In fact, via RTI it came to be known that many of the BJP leaders had given false statements about their education in the EC affidavit. That alone should have been grounds for throwing out the legislators but in their wisdom they see fit to remain blind. The latest case is of Mr. Nishikant Dubey. Of course, even with the legal documents shared in public domain and EC having powers to verify such documents, they are choosing to remain silent. If one has lied about one thing in an affidavit, what or how many lies he has shared in that same document. And how are you supposed to trust anything that comes out of his mouth. This is the state of not just Mr. Dubey but a whole lot of people who are in BJP today. And EC as an institution seems to be let down. There was a time when it was lead by T.N. Seshan who was courageous, fearless and fair. He later went to become Speaker but even then he was harsh but fair. Perhaps people thought we will always have people like him. Hence instead of strong institutions having strong rules, we based our trust on people and hence we are where we are There is much to share but some other day, Till later.

Fiction A few days ago somebody asked me and I think it is an often requested to perhaps all fiction readers as to why we like fiction? First of all, reading in itself is told as food for the soul. Because, whenever you write or read anything you don t just read it, you also visualize it. And that visualization is and would be far greater than any attempt in cinema as there are no budget constraints and it takes no more than a minute to visualize a scenario if the writer is any good. You just close your eyes and in a moment you are transported to a different world. This is also what is known as world building . Something fantasy writers are especially gifted in. Also, with the whole parallel Universes being a reality, it is just so much fertile land for imagination that I just cannot believe that it hasn t been worked to death to date. And you do need a lot of patience to make a world, to make characters, to make characters a bit eccentric one way or the other. And you have to know to put into a three, five, or whatever number of acts you want to put in. And then, of course, they have readers like us who dream and add more color to the story than the author did. As we take his, her, or their story and weave countless stories depending on where we are, where we are and who we are. What people need to understand is that not just readers want escapism but writers too want to escape from the human condition. And they find solace in whatever they write. The well-known example of J.R.R. Tolkien is always there. How he must have felt each day coming after war, to somehow find the strength and just dream away, transport himself to a world of hobbits, elves, and other mysterious beings. It surely must have taken a lot of pain from him that otherwise, he would have felt. There are many others. What also does happen now and then, is authors believe in their own intelligence so much, that they commit crimes, but that s par for the course.

Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse Currently, I am reading the above title. It is perhaps one of the first horror title books that I have read which has so much fun. The hero has a great sense of wit, humor, and sarcasm that you can cut butter with it. Now if you got that, this is par for the wordplay happening every second paragraph and I m just 100 pages in of the 500-page Novel. Now, while I haven t read the whole book and I m just speculating, what if at the end we realize that the hero all along was or is the villain. Sadly, we don t have many such twisted stories and that too is perhaps because most people used to have black and white rather than grey characters. From all my reading, and even watching web series and whatnot, it is only the Europeans who seem to have a taste for exploring grey characters and giving twists at the end that people cannot anticipate. Even their heroes or heroines are grey characters. and they can really take you for a ride. It is also perhaps how we humans are, neither black nor white but more greyish. Having grey characters also frees the author quite a bit as she doesn t have to use so-called tropes and just led the characters to lead themselves.

Indian Book publishing Industry I do know Bengali stories do have a lot of grey characters, but sadly most of the good works are still in Bengali and not widely published compared to say European or American authors. While there is huge potential in the Indian publishing market for English books and there is also hunger, getting good and cheap publishers is the issue. Just recently SAGE publishing division shut down and this does not augur well for the Indian market. In the past few years, I and other readers have seen some very good publishing houses quit India for one reason or the other. GST has also made the sector more expensive. The only thing that works now and has been for some time is the seconds and thirds market. For e.g. I just bought today about 15-20 books @INR 125/- a kind of belated present for the self. That would be what, at the most 2 USD or 2 Euros per book. I bet even a burger costs more than that, but again India being a price-sensitive market, at these prices the seconds book sells. And these are all my favorite authors, Lee Child, Tom Clancy, Dean Koontz, and so on and so forth. I also saw a lot of fantasy books but they would have to wait for another day.

Tourism in India for Debconf 23 I had shared a while back that I would write a bit about tourism as Debconf or Annual Debian Conference will happen in India next year around this time. I was supposed to write it in the FAQ but couldn t find a place or a corner where I could write it. There are actually two things that people need to be aware of. The one thing that people need to be very aware of is food poisoning or Delhi Belly. This is a far too common sight that I have witnessed especially with westerners when they come to visit India. I am somewhat shocked that it hasn t been shared in the FAQ but then perhaps we cannot cover all the bases therein. I did find this interesting article and would recommend the suggestions given in it wholeheartedly. I would suggest people coming to India to buy and have purifying water tablets with them if they decide to stay back and explore India. Now the problem with tourism is, that one can have as much tourism as one wants. One of the unique ways I found some westerners having the time of their life is buying an Indian Rickshaw or Tuk-Tuk and traveling with it. A few years ago, when I was more adventourous-spirited I was able to meet a few of them. There is also the Race with Rickshaws that happens in Rajasthan and you get to see about 10 odd cities in and around Rajasthan state and get to see the vibrancy in the North. If somebody really wants to explore India, then I would suggest getting down to Goa, specifically, South Goa, meeting with the hippie crowd, and getting one of the hippie guidebooks to India. Most people forget that the Hippies came to India in the 1960s and many of them just never left. Tap water in Pune is ok, have seen and experienced the same in Himachal, Garwhal, and Uttarakhand, although it has been a few years since I have been to those places. North-East is a place I have yet to venture into. India does have a lot of beauty but most people are not clean-conscious so if you go to common tourist destinations, you will find a lot of garbage. Most cities in India do give you an option of homestays and some even offer food, so if you are on a budget as well as wanna experience life with an Indian family, that could be something you could look into. So you can see and share about India with different eyes. There is casteism, racism, and all that. Generally speaking, you would see it wielded a lot more in your face in North India than in South India where it is there but far more subtle. About food, what has been shared in the India BOF. Have to say, it doesn t even scratch the surface. If you stay with an Indian family, there is probably a much better chance of exploring the variety of food that India has to offer. From the western perspective, we tend to overcook stuff and make food with Masalas but that s the way most people like it. People who have had hot sauces or whatnot would probably find India much easier to adjust to as tastes might be similar to some extent. If you want to socialize with young people, while discos are an option, meetup.com also is a good place. You can share your passions and many people have taken to it with gusto. We also have been hosting Comiccons in India, but I haven t had the opportunity to attend them so far. India has a rich oral culture reach going back a few thousand years, but many of those who are practicing those reside more in villages rather than in cities. And while there have been attempts in the past to record them, most of those have come to naught as money runs out as there is no commercial viability to such projects, but that probably is for another day. In the end, what I have shared is barely a drop in the ocean that is India. Come, have fun, explore, enjoy and invigorate yourself and others

Politics I have been reading books, both fiction and non-fiction for a long long time. My first book was a comic most probably when I was down with Malaria when I was a kid. I must be around 4-5 years old. Over the years, books have given me great joy and I continue to find nuggets of useful information, both in fiction as well as non-fiction books. So here s to sharing something and how that can lead you to a rabbit hole. This entry would be a bit NSFW as far as language is concerned. NYPD Red 5 by James Patterson First of all, have no clue as to why James Patterson s popularity has been falling. He used to be right there with Lee Child and others, but not so much now. While I try to be mysterious about books, I would give a bit of heads-up so people know what to expect. This is probably more towards the Adult crowd as there is a bit of sex as well as quite a few grey characters. The NYPD Red is a sort of elite police task force that basically is for celebrities. In the book series, they do a lot of ass-kissing (figuratively more than literally). Now the reason I have always liked fiction is that however wild the assumption or presumption is, it does have somewhere a grain of truth. And each and every time I read a book or two, that gets cemented. One of the statements in the book told something about how 9/11 took a lot of police personnel out of the game. First, there were a number of policemen who were patrolling the Two Towers, so they perished literally during the explosion. Then there were policemen who were given the cases to close the cases (bring the cases to conclusion). When you are investigating your own brethren or even civilians who perished 9/11 they must have experienced emotional trauma and no outlet. Mental health even in cops is the same and given similar help as you and me (i.e. next to none.) But both of these were my assumptions. The only statement that was in the book was they lost a lot of bench strength. Even NYFD (New York Fire Department). This led me to me to With Crime At Record Lows, Should NYC Have Fewer Cops? This is more right-wing sentiment and in fact, there have been calls to defund the police. This led me to https://cbcny.org/ and one specific graph. Unfortunately, this tells the story from 2010-2022 but not before. I was looking for data from around 1999 to 2005 because that will tell whether or not it happened. Then I remembered reading in newspapers the year or two later how 9/11 had led NYC to recession. I looked up online and for sure NY was booming before 9/11. One can argue that NYC could come down and that is pretty much possible, everything that goes up comes down, it s a law of nature but it would have been steady rather than abrupt. And once you are in recession, the first thing to go is personnel. So people both from NYPD and NYFD were let go, even though they were needed the most then. As you can see, a single statement in a book can take you to places & time literally. Edit: Addition 11th September There were quite a few people who also died from New York Port Authority and they also lost quite a number of people directly and indirectly and did a lot of patrolling of the water bodies near NYC. Later on, even in their department, there were a lot of early retirements.

Kosovo A couple of days back I had a look at the Debconf 2023 BOF that was done in Kosovo. One of the interesting things that happened during the BOF is when a woman participant chimed in and asks India to recognize Kosovo. Immediately it triggered me and I opened the Kosovo Wikipedia page to get some understanding of the topic. Reading up on it, came to know Russia didn t agree and doesn t recognize Kosovo. Mr. Modi likes Putin and India imports a lot of its oil from Russia. Unrelatedly, but still useful, we rejected to join IPEF. Earlier, we had rejected China s BRI. India has never been as vulnerable as she is now. Our foreign balance has reached record lows. Now India has been importing quite a bit of Russian crude and has been buying arms and ammunition from them. We are also scheduled to buy a couple of warships and submarines etc. We even took arms and ammunition from them on lease. So we can t afford that they are displeased with India. Even though Russia has more than friendly relations with both China and Pakistan. At the same time, the U.S. is back to aiding Pakistan which the mainstream media in India refuses to even cover. And to top all of this, we have the Chip 4 Alliance but that needs its own article, truth be told but we will do with a paragraph Edit Addition 11th September Seems Kosovo isn t unique in that situation, there are 3-4 states like that. A brief look at worldpopulationreview tells you there are many more.

Chip 4 Alliance For almost a decade I have been screaming about this on my blog as well as everywhere that chip fabrication is a national security thing. And for years, most people deny it. And now we have chip 4 alliance. Now to understand this, you have to understand that China for almost a decade, somewhere around 2014 or so came up with something called the big fund . Now one can argue one way or the other how successful the fund has been, but it has, without doubt, created ripples so strong that the U.S., Taiwan, Japan, and probably South Korea will join and try to stem the tide. Interestingly, in this grouping, South Korea is the weakest in the statements and what they have been saying. Within the group itself, there is a lot of tension and China would use that and there are a number of unresolved issues between the three countries that both China & Russia would exploit. For e.g. the Comfort women between South Korea and Japan. Or the 1985 Accord Agreement between Japan and the U.S. Now people need to understand this, this is not just about China but also about us. If China has 5-6x times India s GDP and their research budget is at the very least 100x times what India spends, how do you think we will be self-reliant? Whom are we fooling? Are we not tired of fooling ourselves In diplomacy, countries use leverage. Sadly, we let go of some of our most experienced negotiators in 2014 and since then have been singing in the wind

Accessibility, Jitsi, IRC, Element-Desktop The Wikipedia page on Accessibility says the following Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both direct access (i.e. unassisted) and indirect access meaning compatibility with a person s assistive technology. Now IRC or Internet Relay Chat has been accessible for a long time. I know of even blind people who have been able to navigate IRC quite effortlessly as there has been a lot of work done to make sure all the joints speak to each other so people with one or more disabilities still can use, and contribute without an issue. It does help that IRC and many clients have been there since the 1970s so most of them have had more than enough time to get all the bugs fixed and both text-to-speech and speech-to-text work brilliantly on IRC. Newer software like Jitsi or for that matter Telegram is lacking those features. A few days ago, discovered on Telegram I was shared that Samsung Voice input is also able to do the same. The Samsung Voice Input works wonder as it translates voice to text, I have not yet tried the text-to-speech but perhaps somebody can and they can share whatever the results can be one way or the other. I have tried element-desktop both on the desktop as well as mobile phone and it has been disappointing, to say the least. On the desktop, it is unruly and freezes once in a while, and is buggy. The mobile version is a little better but that s not saying a lot. I prefer the desktop version as I can use the full-size keyboard. The bug I reported has been there since its Riot days. I had put up a bug report even then. All in all, yesterday was disappointing

I grew up with the Internet and its ethics and politics have always been important in my life. But I have also been involved at other levels, against police brutality, for Food, Not Bombs, worker autonomy, software freedom, etc. For a long time, that all seemed coherent. But the more I look at the modern Internet -- and the mega-corporations that control it -- and the less confidence I have in my original political analysis of the liberating potential of technology. I have come to believe that most of our technological development is harmful to the large majority of the population of the planet, and of course the rest of the biosphere. And now I feel this is not a new problem. This is because the Internet is a neo-colonial device, and has been from the start. Let me explain.

What is Neo-Colonialism? The term "neo-colonialism" was coined by Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana. In Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), he wrote:

In place of colonialism, as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism ... [which] like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. ... The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.

So basically, if colonialism is Europeans bringing genocide, war, and its religion to the Africa, Asia, and the Americas, neo-colonialism is the Americans (note the "n") bringing capitalism to the world. Before we see how this applies to the Internet, we must therefore make a detour into US history. This matters, because anyone would be hard-pressed to decouple neo-colonialism from the empire under which it evolves, and here we can only name the United States of America.

US Declaration of Independence Let's start with the United States declaration of independence (1776). Many Americans may roll their eyes at this, possibly because that declaration is not actually part of the US constitution and therefore may have questionable legal standing. Still, it was obviously a driving philosophical force in the founding of the nation. As its author, Thomas Jefferson, stated:

it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion

In that aging document, we find the following pearl:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

As a founding document, the Declaration still has an impact in the sense that the above quote has been called an:

"immortal declaration", and "perhaps [the] single phrase" of the American Revolutionary period with the greatest "continuing importance." (Wikipedia)

Let's read that "immortal declaration" again: "all men are created equal". "Men", in that context, is limited to a certain number of people, namely "property-owning or tax-paying white males, or about 6% of the population". Back when this was written, women didn't have the right to vote, and slavery was legal. Jefferson himself owned hundreds of slaves. The declaration was aimed at the King and was a list of grievances. A concern of the colonists was that the King:

has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

This is a clear mark of the frontier myth which paved the way for the US to exterminate and colonize the territory some now call the United States of America. The declaration of independence is obviously a colonial document, having being written by colonists. None of this is particularly surprising, historically, but I figured it serves as a good reminder of where the Internet is coming from, since it was born in the US.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Two hundred and twenty years later, in 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote a declaration of independence of cyberspace. At this point, (almost) everyone has a right to vote (including women), slavery was abolished (although some argue it still exists in the form of the prison system); the US has made tremendous progress. Surely this text will have aged better than the previous declaration it is obviously derived from. Let's see how it reads today and how it maps to how the Internet is actually built now.

Borders of Independence One of the key ideas that Barlow brings up is that "cyberspace does not lie within your borders". In that sense, cyberspace is the final frontier: having failed to colonize the moon, Americans turn inwards, deeper into technology, but still in the frontier ideology. And indeed, Barlow is one of the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the beloved EFF), founded six years prior. But there are other problems with this idea. As Wikipedia quotes:

The declaration has been criticized for internal inconsistencies.[9] The declaration's assertion that 'cyberspace' is a place removed from the physical world has also been challenged by people who point to the fact that the Internet is always linked to its underlying geography.[10]

And indeed, the Internet is definitely a physical object. First controlled and severely restricted by "telcos" like AT&T, it was somewhat "liberated" from that monopoly in 1982 when an anti-trust lawsuit broke up the monopoly, a key historical event that, one could argue, made the Internet possible. (From there on, "backbone" providers could start competing and emerge, and eventually coalesce into new monopolies: Google has a monopoly on search and advertisement, Facebook on communications for a few generations, Amazon on storage and computing, Microsoft on hardware, etc. Even AT&T is now pretty much as consolidated as it was before.) The point is: all those companies have gigantic data centers and intercontinental cables. And those are definitely prioritizing the western world, the heart of the empire. Take for example Google's latest 3,900 mile undersea cable: it does not connect Argentina to South Africa or New Zealand, it connects the US to UK and Spain. Hardly a revolutionary prospect.

Private Internet But back to the Declaration:

Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

In Barlow's mind, the "public" is bad, and private is good, natural. Or, in other words, a "public construction project" is unnatural. And indeed, the modern "nature" of development is private: most of the Internet is now privately owned and operated. I must admit that, as an anarchist, I loved that sentence when I read it. I was rooting for "us", the underdogs, the revolutionaries. And, in a way, I still do: I am on the board of Koumbit and work for a non-profit that has pivoted towards censorship and surveillance evasion. Yet I cannot help but think that, as a whole, we have failed to establish that independence and put too much trust in private companies. It is obvious in retrospect, but it was not, 30 years ago. Now, the infrastructure of the Internet has zero accountability to traditional political entities supposedly representing the people, or even its users. The situation is actually worse than when the US was founded (e.g. "6% of the population can vote"), because the owners of the tech giants are only a handful of people who can override any decision. There's only one Amazon CEO, he's called Jeff Bezos, and he has total control. (Update: Bezos actually ceded the CEO role to Andy Jassy, AWS and Amazon music founder, while remaining executive chairman. I would argue that, as the founder and the richest man on earth, he still has strong control over Amazon.)

Social Contract Here's another claim of the Declaration:

We are forming our own Social Contract.

I remember the early days, back when "netiquette" was a word, it did feel we had some sort of a contract. Not written in standards of course -- or barely (see RFC1855) -- but as a tacit agreement. How wrong we were. One just needs to look at Facebook to see how problematic that idea is on a global network. Facebook is the quintessential "hacker" ideology put in practice. Mark Zuckerberg explicitly refused to be "arbiter of truth" which implicitly means he will let lies take over its platforms. He also sees Facebook as place where everyone is equal, something that echoes the Declaration:

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

(We note, in passing, the omission of gender in that list, also mirroring the infamous "All men are created equal" claim of the US declaration.) As the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) Facebook files later shown, both of those "contracts" have serious limitations inside Facebook. There are VIPs who systematically bypass moderation systems including fascists and rapists. Drug cartels and human traffickers thrive on the platform. Even when Zuckerberg himself tried to tame the platform -- to get people vaccinated or to make it healthier -- he failed: "vaxxer" conspiracies multiplied and Facebook got angrier. This is because the "social contract" behind Facebook and those large companies is a lie: their concern is profit and that means advertising, "engagement" with the platform, which causes increased anxiety and depression in teens, for example. Facebook's response to this is that they are working really hard on moderation. But the truth is that even that system is severely skewed. The WSJ showed that Facebook has translators for only 50 languages. It's a surprisingly hard to count human languages but estimates range the number of distinct languages between 2500 and 7000. So while 50 languages seems big at first, it's actually a tiny fraction of the human population using Facebook. Taking the first 50 of the Wikipedia list of languages by native speakers we omit languages like Dutch (52), Greek (74), and Hungarian (78), and that's just a few random nations picks from Europe. As an example, Facebook has trouble moderating even a major language like Arabic. It censored content from legitimate Arab news sources when they mentioned the word al-Aqsa because Facebook associates it with the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades when they were talking about the Al-Aqsa Mosque... This bias against Arabs also shows how Facebook reproduces the American colonizer politics. The WSJ also pointed out that Facebook spends only 13% of its moderation efforts outside of the US, even if that represents 90% of its users. Facebook spends three more times moderating on "brand safety", which shows its priority is not the safety of its users, but of the advertisers.

Military Internet Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the Lewis and Clark of our generation. Just like the latter were sent by Jefferson (the same) to declare sovereignty over the entire US west coast, Google declared sovereignty over all human knowledge, with its mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". (It should be noted that Page somewhat questioned that mission but only because it was not ambitious enough, Google having "outgrown" it.) The Lewis and Clark expedition, just like Google, had a scientific pretext, because that is what you do to colonize a world, presumably. Yet both men were military and had to receive scientific training before they left. The Corps of Discovery was made up of a few dozen enlisted men and a dozen civilians, including York an African American slave owned by Clark and sold after the expedition, with his final fate lost in history. And just like Lewis and Clark, Google has a strong military component. For example, Google Earth was not originally built at Google but is the acquisition of a company called Keyhole which had ties with the CIA. Those ties were brought inside Google during the acquisition. Google's increasing investment inside the military-industrial complex eventually led Google to workers organizing a revolt although it is currently unclear to me how much Google is involved in the military apparatus. Other companies, obviously, do not have such reserve, with Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty of others happily bidding on military contracts all the time.

Spreading the Internet I am obviously not the first to identify colonial structures in the Internet. In an article titled The Internet as an Extension of Colonialism, Heather McDonald correctly identifies fundamental problems with the "development" of new "markets" of Internet "consumers", primarily arguing that it creates a digital divide which creates a "lack of agency and individual freedom":

Many African people have gained access to these technologies but not the freedom to develop content such as web pages or social media platforms in their own way. Digital natives have much more power and therefore use this to create their own space with their own norms, shaping their online world according to their own outlook.

But the digital divide is certainly not the worst problem we have to deal with on the Internet today. Going back to the Declaration, we originally believed we were creating an entirely new world:

This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

How I dearly wished that was true. Unfortunately, the Internet is not that different from the offline world. Or, to be more accurate, the values we have embedded in the Internet, particularly of free speech absolutism, sexism, corporatism, and exploitation, are now exploding outside of the Internet, into the "real" world. The Internet was built with free software which, fundamentally, was based on quasi-volunteer labour of an elite force of white men with obviously too much time on their hands (and also: no children). The mythical writing of GCC and Emacs by Richard Stallman is a good example of this, but the entirety of the Internet now seems to be running on random bits and pieces built by hit-and-run programmers working on their copious free time. Whenever any of those fails, it can compromise or bring down entire systems. (Heck, I wrote this article on my day off...) This model of what is fundamentally "cheap labour" is spreading out from the Internet. Delivery workers are being exploited to the bone by apps like Uber -- although it should be noted that workers organise and fight back. Amazon workers are similarly exploited beyond belief, forbidden to take breaks until they pee in bottles, with ambulances nearby to carry out the bodies. During peak of the pandemic, workers were being dangerously exposed to the virus in warehouses. All this while Amazon is basically taking over the entire economy. The Declaration culminates with this prophecy:

We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

This prediction, which first felt revolutionary, is now chilling.

Colonial Internet The Internet is, if not neo-colonial, plain colonial. The US colonies had cotton fields and slaves, we have disposable cell phones and Foxconn workers. Canada has its cultural genocide, Facebook has his own genocides in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and mob violence in India. Apple is at least implicitly accepting the Uyghur genocide. And just like the slaves of the colony, those atrocities are what makes the empire run. The Declaration actually ends like this, a quote which I have in my fortune cookies file:

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

That is still inspiring to me. But if we want to make "cyberspace" more humane, we need to decolonize it. Work on cyberpeace instead of cyberwar. Establish clear code of conduct, discuss ethics, and question your own privileges, biases, and culture. For me the first step in decolonizing my own mind is writing this article. Breaking up tech monopolies might be an important step, but it won't be enough: we have to do a culture shift as well, and that's the hard part.

Appendix: an apology to Barlow I kind of feel bad going through Barlow's declaration like this, point by point. It is somewhat unfair, especially since Barlow passed away a few years ago and cannot mount a response (even humbly assuming that he might read this). But then again, he himself recognized he was a bit too "optimistic" in 2009, saying: "we all get older and smarter":

I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

And, in a sense, it was a little naive to expect Barlow to not be a colonist. Barlow is, among many things, a cattle rancher who grew up on a colonial ranch in Wyoming. The ranch was founded in 1907 by his great uncle, 17 years after the state joined the Union, and only a generation or two after the Powder River War (1866-1868) and Black Hills War (1876-1877) during which the US took over lands occupied by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other native American nations, in some of the last major First Nations Wars.

Appendix: further reading There is another article that almost has the same title as this one: Facebook and the New Colonialism. (Interestingly, the <title> tag on the article is actually "Facebook the Colonial Empire" which I also find appropriate.) The article is worth reading in full, but I loved this quote so much that I couldn't resist reproducing it here:

Representations of colonialism have long been present in digital landscapes. ( Even Super Mario Brothers, the video game designer Steven Fox told me last year. You run through the landscape, stomp on everything, and raise your flag at the end. ) But web-based colonialism is not an abstraction. The online forces that shape a new kind of imperialism go beyond Facebook.

It goes on:

Consider, for example, digitization projects that focus primarily on English-language literature. If the web is meant to be humanity s new Library of Alexandria, a living repository for all of humanity s knowledge, this is a problem. So is the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia pages are about a relatively tiny square of the planet. For instance, 14 percent of the world s population lives in Africa, but less than 3 percent of the world s geotagged Wikipedia articles originate there, according to a 2014 Oxford Internet Institute report.

And they introduce another definition of Neo-colonialism, while warning about abusing the word like I am sort of doing here:

I m loath to toss around words like colonialism but it s hard to ignore the family resemblances and recognizable DNA, to wit, said Deepika Bahri, an English professor at Emory University who focuses on postcolonial studies. In an email, Bahri summed up those similarities in list form:

1. ride in like the savior
2. bandy about words like equality, democracy, basic rights
3. mask the long-term profit motive (see 2 above)
4. justify the logic of partial dissemination as better than nothing
5. partner with local elites and vested interests
6. accuse the critics of ingratitude

In the end, she told me, if it isn t a duck, it shouldn t quack like a duck.

Another good read is the classic Code and other laws of cyberspace (1999, free PDF) which is also critical of Barlow's Declaration. In "Code is law", Lawrence Lessig argues that:

computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does (Wikipedia)

And now it feels like the west coast has won over the east coast, or maybe it recolonized it. In any case, Internet now christens emperors.

I had a twitter fight few days back with a gentleman and the article is a result of that fight. Sadly, I do not know the name of the gentleman as he goes via a psuedo name and then again I ve not taken permission from him to quote him in either way. So I will just state the observations I was able to make from the conversations we had. As people who read this blog regularly would know, I am and have been against Railway Privatization which is happening in India. And will be sharing some of the case studies from other countries as to how it panned out for them.

UK Railways

How Privatization Fails : Railways

The Above video is by a gentleman called Shaun who basically shared that privatization as far as UK is concerned is nothing but monopolies and while there are complex reasons for the same, the design of the Railways is such that it will always be a monopoly structure. At the most what you can do is have several monopolies but that is all that can happen. The idea of competition just cannot happen. Even the idea that subsidies will be less or/and trains will run on time is far from fact. Both of these facts have been checked and found to be truthful by fullfact.org. It is and argued that UK is small and perhaps it doesn t have the right conditions. It is probably true but still we do deserve to have a glance at the UK railway map.

UK railway map with operators

The above map is copyrighted to Map Marketing where you could see it today . As can be seen above most companies had their own specified areas. Now if you had looked at the facts then you would have seen that UK fares have been higher. In fact, an oldish article from Metro (a UK publication) shares the same. In fact, UK nationalized its railways effectively as many large rail operators were running in red. Even Scotland is set to nationalised back in March 2022. Remember this is a country which hasn t seen inflation go upwards of 5% in nearly a decade. The only outlier was 2011 where they indeed breached the 5% mark. So from this, what we see is Private Gains and Private Gains Public Losses perhaps seem fit. But then maybe we didn t use the right example. Perhaps Japan would be better. They have bullet trains while UK is still thinking about it. (HS2).

Japanese Railway Below is the map of Japanese Railway

Railway map of Japan with private ownership courtesy Wikimedia commons

Japan started privatizing its railway in 1987 and to date it has not been fully privatized. And on top of it, amount as much as 24 trillion of the long-term JNR debt was shouldered by the government at the expense of taxpayers of Japan while also reducing almost 1/4th of it employees. To add to it, while some parts of Japanese Railways did make profits, many of them made profits by doing large-scale non-railway business mostly real estate of land adjacent to railway stations. In many cases, it seems this went all the way up to 60% of the revenue. The most profitable has been the Shinkansen though. And while it has been profitable, it has not been without safety scandals over the years, the biggest in recent years was the 2005 Amagasaki derailment. What was interesting to me was the Aftermath, while the Wikipedia page doesn t share much, I had read at the time and probably could be found how a lot of ordinary people stood up to the companies in a country where it is a known fact that most companies are owned by the Yakuza. And this is a country where people are loyal to their corporation or company no matter what. It is a strange culture to west and also here in India where people change jobs on drop of hat, although nowadays we have record unemployment. So perhaps Japan too does not meet our standard as it doesn t do competition with each other but each is a set monopoly in those regions. Also how much subsidy is there or not is not really transparent.

U.S. Railways Last, but not the least I share the U.S. Railway map. This is provided by A Mr. Tom Alison on reddit on channel maporn. As the thread itself is archived and I do not know the gentleman concerned, nor have taken permission for the map, hence sharing the compressed version

U.S. Railway lines with the different owners

Now the U.S. Railways is and has always been peculiar as unlike the above two the U.S. has always been more of a freight network. Probably, much of it has to do that in the 1960 s when oil was cheap, the U.S. made zillions of roadways and romanticized the road trip and has been doing it ever since. Also the creation of low-cost airlines definitely didn t help the railways to have more passenger services, in fact the opposite. There are and have been smaller services and attempts of privatization in both New Zealand and Australia and both have been failures. Please see papers in that regard. My simple point is this, as can be seen above, there have been various attempts at privatization of railways and most of them have been a mixed bag. The only one which comes close to what we think as good is Japanese but that also used a lot of public debt which we don t know what will happen on next. Also for higher-speed train services like a bullet train or whatever, you need to direct, no hair pen bends. In fact, a good talk on the topic is the TBD podcast which while it talks about hyperloop, the same questions is and would be asked if were to do in India. Another thing to be kept in mind is that the Japanese have been exceptional builders and this is because they have been forced to. They live in a seismically active zone which made Fukushima disaster a reality but at the same time, their buildings are earthquake-resistant. Standard Disclaimer The above is a simplified version of things. I could have added in financial accounts but that again has no set pattern. For e.g. some Railways use accrual, some use cash and some use hybrid. I could have also shared in either the guage or electrification but all have slightly different standards, although uniguage is something that all Railways aspire for and electrification is again something that all Railways want although in many cases it just isn t economically feasible.

Indian Railways Indian Railways itself recently made the move from Cash to Accrual couple of years back. In-between for a couple of years, it was hybrid. The sad part is and was you can now never measure against past performance in the old way because it is so different. Hence, whether the Railways will be making a loss or a profit, we would come to know only much later. Also, most accountants don t know the new system well, so it is gonna take more time, how much unknown. Sadly, what GOI did a few years back is merge the Railway budget into the Union Budget. Of course, the excuse they gave is too many pressures of new trains, while the truth is, by doing this, they decreased transparency about the whole thing. For e.g. for the last few years, the only state which had significant work being done is in U.P. (Uttar Pradesh) and a bit in Goa, although that is has been protested time and again. I being from the neighborly state of Maharashtra , and have been there several times. Now it does feels all like a dream, going to Goa :(.

Covid news Now before I jump on the news, I should share the movie Virus (2019) which was made by the talented Aashiq Abu. Even though, am not a Malayalee, I still have enjoyed many of his movies simply because he is a terrific director and Malayalam movies, at least most of them have English subtitles and lot of original content.. Interestingly, unlike the first couple of times when I saw it a couple of years back. The first time I saw it, I couldn t sleep a wink for a week. Even the next time, it was heavy. I had shared the movie with mum, and even she couldn t see it in one go. It is and was that powerful Now maybe because we are headlong in the pandemic, and the madness is all around us. There are two terms that helped me though understand a great deal of what is happening in the movie, the first term was altered sensorium which has been defined here. The other is saturation or to be more precise oxygen saturation . This term has also entered the Indian twitter lexicon quite a bit as India has started running out of oxygen. Just today Delhi High Court did an emergency hearing on the subject late at night. Although there is much to share about the mismanagement of the center, the best piece on the subject has been by Miss Priya Ramani. Yup, the same lady who has won against M.J. Akbar and this is when Mr. Akbar had 100 lawyers for this specific case. It would be interesting to see what happens ahead. There are however few things even she forgot in her piece, For e.g. reverse migration i.e. from urban to rural migration started again. Two articles from different entities sharing a similar outlook.Sadly, the right have no empathy or feeling for either the poor or the sick. Even the labor minister Santosh Gangwar s statement that around 1.04 crores were the only people who walked back home. While there is not much data, however some work/research has been done on migration to cites that the number could be easily 10 times as much. And this was in the lockdown of last year. This year, again the same issue has re-surfaced and migrants learning lessons started leaving cities. And I m ashamed to say I think they are doing the right thing. Most State Governments have not learned lessons nor have they done any work to earn the trust of migrants. This is true of almost all state Governments. Last year, just before the lockdown was announced, me and my friend spent almost 30k getting a cab all the way from Chennai to Pune, how much we paid for the cab, how much we bribed the various people just so we could cross the state borders to return home to our anxious families. Thankfully, unlike the migrants, we were better off although we did make a loss. I probably wouldn t be alive if I were in their situation as many didn t. That number is still in the air undocumented deaths Vaccine issues Currently, though the issue has been the Vaccine and the pricing of the same. A good article to get a summation of the issues outlined has been shared on Economist. Another article that goes to the heart of the issue is at scroll. To buttress the argument, the SII chairman had shared this few weeks back

Adar Poonawala talking to Vishnu Som on Left, right center, 7th April 2021.

So, a licensee manufacturer wants to make super-profits during the pandemic. And now, as shared above they can very easily do it. Even the quotes given to nearby countries is smaller than the quotes given to Indian states

Prices of AstraZeneca among various states and countries.

The situation around beds, vaccines, oxygen, anything is so dire that people could go to any lengths to save their loved ones. Even if they know if a certain medicine doesn t work. For e.g. Remdesivir, 5 WHO trials have concluded that it doesn t increase mortality. Heck, even AIIMS chief said the same. But both doctors and relatives desperation to cling on hope has made Remdesivir as a black market drug with unoffical prices hovering anywhere between INR 14k/- to INR30k/- per vial. One of the executives of a top firm was also arrested in Gujarat. In Maharashtra, the opposition M.P. came to the rescue of the officials of Bruick pharms in Mumbai. Sadly, this strange affliction to the party in the center is also there in my extended family. At one end, they will heap praise on Mr. Modi, at the same time they can t get wait to get fast out of India. Many of them have settled in horrors of horror Dubai, as it is the best place to do business, get international schools for the young ones at decent prices, cheaper or maybe a tad more than what they paid in Delhi or elsewhere. Being an Agarwal or a Gupta makes it easier to compartmentalize both things. Ease of doing business, 5 days flat to get a business registered, up and running. And the paranoia is still there. They won t talk on the phone about him because they are afraid they may say something which comes back to bite them. As far as their decision to migrate, can t really blame them. If I were 20-25 yeas younger and my mum were in a better shape than she is, we probably would have migrated as well, although would have preferred Europe than anywhere else.

Internet Freedom and Aarogya Setu App.

Internet Freedom had shared the chilling effects of the Aarogya Setu App. This had also been shared by FSCI in the past, and recently had their handle being banned on Twitter. This was also apparent in a legal bail order which the high court judge gave. While I won t go into the merits and demerits of the bail order, it is astounding for the judge to say that the accused, even though he would be on bail install an app. so he can be surveilled. And this is a high court judge, such a sad state of affairs. We seem to be putting up new lows every day when it comes to judicial jurisprudence. One interesting aspect of the whole case was shared by Aishwarya Iyer. She shared a story that she and her team worked on quint which raises questions on the quality of the work done by Delhi Police. This is of course, up to Delhi Police to ascertain the truth of the matter because unless and until they are able to tie in the PMO s office in for a leak or POTUS s office it hardly seems possible. For e.g. the dates when two heads of state can meet each other would be decided by the secretaries of the two. Once the date is known, it would be shared with the press while at the same time some sort of security apparatus would kick in place. It is incumbent, especially on the host to take as much care as he can of the guest. We all remember that World War 1 (the war to end all wars) started due to the murder of Archduke Ferdinand.

As nobody wants that, the best way is to make sure that a political murder doesn t happen on your watch. Now while I won t comment on what it would be, it would be safe to assume that it would be z+ security along with higher readiness. Especially if it as somebody as important as POTUS. Now, it would be quite a reach for Delhi Police to connect the two dates. They either will have to get creative with the dates or some other way. Otherwise, with practically no knowledge in the public domain, they can t work in limbo. In either case, I do hope the case comes up for hearing soon and we see what the Delhi Police says and contends in the High Court about the same. At the very least, it would be irritating for them to talk of the dates unless they can contend some mass conspiracy which involves the PMO (and would bring into question the constant vetting done by the Intelligence dept. of all those who work in PMO). And this whole case is to kind of shelter to the Delhi riots which happened in which majorly the Muslims died but their deaths lay unaccounted till date

Conclusion In Conclusion, I would like to share a bit of humor because right now the atmosphere is humorless, both with authoritarian tendencies of the Central Govt. and the mass mismanagement of public health which they now have left to the state to do as they fit. The peice I am sharing is from arre, one of my goto sites whenever I feel low.

Freedom house puts India in partly free Just couple of days ago, freedom house published its 2020 rankings for all countries including India. While freedom house shared how democracy in the world has weakened, India chose to take offense about it being called partly free .

India, leader in Internet shutdowns Access Now (copyright)

The above illustration is shared by accessnow . The next big ones who have Internet shutdowns are Yemen 6 and Ethiopia 4. Such internet shutdowns have and will have sad repercussions as would share in another story as well.

Color-coding journalists A story was broken by caravan magazine yesterday and which was followed by newslaundry which shows how the Govt. is looking to just drive some narrative, does not matter whether it s true or false, it should just show that the Govt. is right and others are all wrong. As can be seen, almost all reporters barring a few have kept silent rather than refuting statements attributed to them or happenings which didn t happen. And this goes to a much larger narrative and disinformation route taken by the Govt. which doesn t have any semblance to the truth or reality as people know it. I would illustrate couple of examples below which shares that. In all my young and even adult-life I hadn t seen a Govt. this much against its own people.

Omega Seiki puts a manufacturing plant in Bangladesh Now Omega Seiki is an Indian vendor who chose or had to go to manufacture their electric vehicles in Bangladesh. Now while this is a slightly old story this was broken on social media recently. Everybody starting blaming both the vendor and saying we should break FTA (Free Trade Agreement) with Bangladesh, not knowing that despite the FTA, India has put tariff barriers between India and Bangladesh. I had to share research from Brookings to show where India has been losing. Of course, those who don t want to see, wouldn t see anything wrong in the picture.

Teen raped, asked to marry the accused when she turns 18 Now you may see the above headlines and feel it is ridiculous, but the fact is that these orders were put or given by Madras High Court couple of months back. This was then reported by both Livelaw and BarandBench respectively. Now to be truthful, this news didn t make much noise as it should have, probably as I had shared previously that the Govt. wants to lower the marriageable age to 15 or even less. And this is despite all the medical evidence on the contrary, because it assuages this Govt s masculinity. There is also the very recent case where the SC CJI asked the rapist if he is willing to marry a girl who was underage when she reaches maturity. Another one in which it seems martial rape is not a crime according to the CJI. So it seems these are the state of things in which India finds itself today. There are judges like Vrinda Grover who do question CJI but they are few and there are costs to them who ask questions. Although, as shared this news was overtaken by other news and would have remained so, if not one of the leaders of the present Govt. , a Ramesh Jarkiholi, who hails from Belagavi region of north Karnataka was caught in a sex CD scandal basically asking sexual favors for a permanent Govt. job. He had made statements after the Madras High Court case applauding the judgement given by the judge. While, due to public pressure he had to resign, but not before stating that he had everybody blue films including the Chief Minister of the State. And sad to report that six Karnataka Ministers rushed today or rather yesterday to put a petition in the civil court to restrain media from airing/printing/publishing any defamatory content against them. The court has granted a media gag against 68 media houses for the same. Sadly, the recent happening only reinforce what has been happening in Karnataka since a decade. Update 07/03/2021 Seems yesterday another 10 odd ministers rushed to get the same order. Seems different laws apply to politicians vis-a-vis others. A recent example of Rhea Chakravarthy, an actress and girlfriend of Sushant Singh who was hounded in his suicide case and many accusations made on TV but no evidence till date. From what we know as facts, Sushant committed suicide as he was not getting work due to cronyism in Bollywood. In fact, those who were behind it have white-washed themselves, deleted their tweets etc. and while the public knows, no accountability on them. In fact, there is and was so much that I wanted to share as to what has been happening to women, sadly and thankfully arre did the needful for me. They wrote an entire article which tells what the situation for women in India today is. And if you are wondering why I said, that is because when a site which was made exclusively for people to laugh and have a good time and get relief, when they start writing serious articles, you can be sure that things have gone horribly wrong

Asking Tesla to come to India and at the same time ambivalent on battery Recently, Mr. Nitin Gadkari, a prominent minister of the present Govt. invited Tesla and gave all sorts of incentives to start a manufacturing plant here in India. And while it seems that Tesla has accepted, looking at the Vodafone case, hopefully Tesla does make such contracts where if something goes wrong and they need to sue the Govt. they can do it in States or elsewhere. The way the Govt. acted in the Vodafone case had been a dampener to any MNC investments so far. Although to be fair to both Tesla and GOI, the basic models even if they are manufactured in India will go to less than 1% of the population. The cheapest Tesla Model Y which retails in the U.S. for USD 40k would be around INR 30 lakh. And this is their cheapest car to date. I do know there are rumors of the 25k but that is probably 2-3 years away as shared by Tesla China President Tom Zhu in an interview shared on YT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH5leMWFBxI There are couple of interesting comments being made. The fact that China is going to fully open its automobile market to western companies shows how confident China feels about their own vendors. And I m not much impressed about Tesla as I am about the tiny car revolution happening in China. India, if it wanted to, could learn many lessons from China. Even the electric buses they had started in 2010 itself where people in our auto industry thought it was all a fad. Sadly, we are missing most of the technology and if and by the time Tesla starts a production line, dunno where we could get our lithium. India hasn t been as aggressive as other countries when it comes to securing raw natural resources in other countries, as some other countries have. Even besides that, it has been tough when you have so many people who still believe that ICE vehicles (Internal Combustion Engines) are better than EV s and even if they know they choose to believe the propaganda. Couple of months ago a young UK girl who had died due to asthma, an inquest found that air pollution was a factor. The girl s name was Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah. This is the first case where the doctor ruled air pollution as a chief factor in a person s death. Probably first of its kind of ruling anywhere in the world. I also shared TCO studies between BEV and ICE vehicles done by people who are considering an electric vehicle but those studies seem to fall on deaf ears.

Starlink This is another of Elon Musk s ventures and would be a money spinner for sure in around the globe. While Starlink has asked TRAI for permission, I don t think they will get it. There is also Bharti Global s Oneweb which probably has a better chance of getting permissions. The reason is censorship. As shared above, India is now a leader in Internet shutdowns and do see this trend only accelerate rather than go the other way around. For people who don t remember, remember how satellite phones were made illegal even though only businessmen could afford it. And this was just 5 years ago. As shared Oneweb would have better shot as they would accept all Government directives without a second thought. Unless Starlink gives a binding to the Govt. to be a willing partner when it wants to have internet shutdowns, it will not work. Now how Elon approaches that is to be seen and known. FWIW, you can t access Starlink webpage on BSNL broadband. My broadband provider gives at the most 300 kbps and sometimes, at late nights or early mornings, around 500 kbps.

Farmer Protests
Lastly, farmer protests have entered 100 days. In the interim, Vivek Kaul, an economist took stock of the Bihar APMC to see if things have really worked as the Govt. supporters were telling. The investigation and the results didn t inspire the confidence as the Govt. said. The sad part is though, that nowadays nobody, at least those in power as well as those who are supporters are keen to read, understand and even argue otherwise. They are all happy with whatsapp knowledge. Till date 200+ people have died in the farmer protests. All mainstream media houses have stopped talking about farmers in the hope that they will disappear. At the end of the day the Govt. wants that the corporates should win at whatever the cost.

Farmer on-going protests Before I start with the education system in India which I have talked about many times in the past, first let me share couple of pieces about the farmer movement which is still at Sanghu Delhi border. The above picture became somewhat viral as it showed Manjeet Kaur, who drove down from Patiala, Punjab to Sanghu border along with her friends to take part in the on-going protests. The picture not only shares how the women are part and parcel of this protest but also they are independently taking part in the protest. The other were two articles I read today, first was an article in tribune which questions that if the policy worked, why it didn t work in the state of Bihar. The other by a young law student who had to go from Chandigarh to Delhi with family for some work and her experience with the ongoing protest. In fact, an interesting observation was made by the CJI in the many suits against farmer protests in the SC. This makes for much more interesting read when you see an RTI query filed by Saket Gokhale to NHAI , a Central Govt. agency which is supposed to be independent and asks if they had filed an FIR and asked compensation from Haryana State and Haryana State Police which had dug up National Highway 44 and if any permission was asked for the same from NHAI. And NHAI unable to take any action for the same. If this isn t shameful, I dunno what is

NHAI response to Saket Gokhale s query.

Sadly, the way the response has been worded makes it impossible for NHAI to discharge its own responsibilities and this becomes a precedent for other states now that know that NHAI is vulnerable. A pretty sad turn on events. Indian Education can t go online There was a recent article on scroll which shared how Indian education can t go online as only a few have computers with decent netlink speeds as well as other factors which are needed for online education. But there are also many things that the article doesn t take into account which actually make the task more difficult and raise the boundary more. Now in most schools and colleges, the number of students to teacher ratio could be anywhere between 70-150 or even more. In the last few years, a lot of schools have been closed down by various Governments, including and not limited to the ruling Govt. They have in fact intensified closures of public schools wherever their Govt. has been in power. Closing to 5000+ schools in one state in a year is a dramatic shift and such has been happening time and again. In fact, the rising costs of Indian education has made many to leave Indian shores and do studies abroad. And once they do their masters or whatever, the chances of them coming back to India become more and more remote. In India the costs have been becoming so bad that NBFC s have started products targeting the same. How NBFC and Banks have (both public and private) have fared with respect to Indian consumers needs its own blog post but one word to describe it is bad . But as shared above, needs its own blog post. Coming to the Indian context though, what has not been captured in that article is that the responsibility of making new content also raises huge barriers for teachers. My own experience in teacher s trainings for ICT usage has shown that most teachers do not know and use internet effectively both to sustain their own curiosity as well as their students. Part of which is whether you are private employee or a public school teacher, the teacher is not paid enough. I have had multiple conversations with friends over the years who are teachers who shared that they get 50% salary in-hand while they sign for 100%. This is more in the case or private schools though. In Govt. schools, the teachers apart from their regular administrative duties apart from teaching duties are also unpaid labor for Govt. policy. Take the recent covid crisis, it was the teachers who for months together went from door-to-door asking if they had a covid patient. This was all over India. Even for voter registration, census, polio and various other immunization efforts, the teachers are roped in. So apart from that, they somehow have to figure out how to make ends meet and also boost student morale. Hence the attention is only limited to the first couple of benches rather than the whole as a 45-minute to an hr. session is just not enough to go through a class of 70-150 school students giving individual attention. And this is when for most teachers, teaching is a means to an end and not the end itself. I am going to take one example of science and sort of break-it-down in multiple steps and how I would have approached that topic for say the 5th-6th standard students in say a public school in Pune and especially if Covid would not have been an issue so you have face-to-face meetup. There was recent news about a mysterious radio signal which came from one of our closest galactic neighbors Proxima Centauri. Now let s say there was a class I was teaching/sharing which I had shared before and there already is trust formed. So before coming to the news, I would tell the students about frequency and more generally the notation of why we like to measure things and how we measure things. There is so much beautiful history which could be acted and enacted which can show and remains in mind why measurement is needed. Once that is understood, discussed and an underpinning is established, we could move to human perception or the lack of it. We know that humans have lots of limits in almost everything, whether it is talking, touching, hearing, all of our five senses are pretty limited with what we know of spectrum available in the immediate family kingdom as well as in the Universe. I would start with how far can a person throw his voice and be heard without using any other means. There does come a point where they need to use anything from a megaphone to a loudspeaker and what it actually does. The other thing I would then talk is about the radio and ask the students to find more about the internals of a radio. If possible to bring an old radio to school where it could be disassembled. After they are familiar with some names of the electronic components and what they do, take them to the electronics market where they try to source all the things needed to make a radio and whatever they encounter. This would allow the students to try and do bargain shopping as well as learn from where to source things. Some might even get a copy or two of electronic projects where the shop themselves sell blueprints to hobbyists so that they can tinker. If there is a place in the school where soldering can be done, then all can try and sooner or later we come to know if something works or not. There is also possibility of talking about noise cancellation and then the topic of ITU can also be bought up and how they do frequency allocation. Last but not the least then the topic can be approached about an alien civilization and an unknown radio signal and what it means and what it can mean. Now if just one topic can give such a wide range of things to do and develop an understanding about not the subject itself but surrounding subjects as well I see no reason why teachers can t do this except they are handcuffed to lot of policy as well as real-life constraints. For e.g. I remember in my school days, we used to go out once or twice a year and that used to be either a school picnic or something similar. The only other I know is going to Mumbai for Nehru planetarium and Nehru science Centre. Unfortunately, I didn t go at that time because the school was taking students via air and the tickets were super costly at the time and that too for a 10 minute journey between the two cities. Those were different days, today you can t have a direct flight between the two cities as it doesn t make an economic sense. It makes more sense to go to Mumbai via train or bus as you will reach Mumbai in about couple of hrs. Of course, Pune does have its own planetarium at New English school and there are a few amateur astronomy clubs in Pune but nothing on the scale that what Mumbai has, but then this is getting off-topic. Now, again in an online world could this be done? Not without both the teacher and the student both spending lot of resources online and even then will be a lower understanding as both the hands-on experience as well as interacting with other students and learning from other students (aping) would be hugely limited. Even the social skills that students develop in a school setting will be rusted. My own social skills probably have weakened and rusted as I have very limited interaction with people over the past few months due to Covid fears and would be at least for the next few years till a large enough population is not vaccinated.

Issues with Farm Laws While I have written about the farm laws a bit sometime back. The issue is still in the nation s eye and that is due to the policies which have been done. I have been reading up on it quite a bit and also have been seeing what has been happening in here and now. The problems are with the three bills themselves which I have shared as below Click to access farmers-produce-trade-and-commerce-promotion-and-facilation-bill.pdf Click to access farmers-empowerment-and-protection-bill.pdf Click to access essential-commodities-bill-2020.pdf Biggest issue with the laws While there are many issues with the laws themselves but for me the biggest issue is that the fundamental right of the farmer to get justice via civil courts has been railroaded. From the laws itself. Standard disclaimer not a lawyer, please consult one for any issues per-se.

Farmers-produce-trade-and-commerce (promotion and facilitation-bill) 2020 Page 4 Chapter 3 Section 8 (1)8. (1) In case of any dispute arising out of a transaction between the farmer and a trader under section 4, the parties may seek a mutually acceptable solution through conciliation by filing an application to the Sub-Divisional Magistrate who shall refer such dispute to a Conciliation Board to be appointed by him for facilitating the binding settlement of the dispute. (2) Every Board of Conciliation appointed by the Sub-Divisional Magistrate under sub-section (1), shall consist of a chairperson and such members not less than two and not more than four, as the Sub-Divisional Magistrate may deem fit.10 (5) If the parties to the transaction under sub-section (1) are unable to resolve the dispute within thirty days in the manner set out under this section, they may approach the Sub-Divisional Magistrate concerned who shall be the Sub-Divisional Authority for settlement of such dispute. (8) Any party aggrieved by the order of the Sub-Divisional Authority may prefer an appeal before the Appellate Authority (Collector or Additional Collector nominated by the Collector) within thirty days of such order who shall dispose of the appeal within thirty days from the date of filing of such appeal. 10. (1) Any person aggrieved by an order under section 9 may, prefer an appeal within sixty days from the date of such order, to an officer not below the rank of Joint Secretary to the Government of India to be nominated by the Central Government for this purpose: Page 6 of the bill. 13. No suit, prosecution or other legal proceedings shall lie against the Central Government or the State Government, or any officer of the Central Government or the State Government or any other person in respect of anything which is in good faith done or intended to be done under this Act or of any rules or orders made thereunder. Page 7 of the bill, 15. No civil court shall have jurisdiction to entertain any suit or proceedings in respect of any matter, the cognizance of which can be taken and disposed of by any authority empowered by or under this Act or the rules made thereunder. Now the same laws have been reiterated for the farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill, 2020. The problem is that too much power is being put into the hands of the executive. All the three, whether it is SDM (Sub-Divisional Magistrate) , the Appellate Authority or the Government Secretary directly are subservient to the whims and fancies of the Central Govt. They after all get their salaries from the Govt. itself. So there will be no independent oversight to any injustices done to the farmer. The third bill i.e. the Essential Commodities Bill, 2020 does away with stock limits on traders and big players like Adani and Ambani. This means that both these players can take and keep produce at their end thereby forcing consumers like you and me who at the retail end would have to pay higher prices for fruits and vegetables while from the producer they will take at the lowest price possible. While I have shared is just one of the points. That is the reason why even the Supreme Court bar association which almost never takes part in politics has been forced to take sides with the farmers. In many ways, one is forced to remember the Emergency Update 11/12/20 Came across this article on the wire which tells how everybody s rights, not just the farmer s rights are being shod over. I think it depicts correctly the signs of time to come. While arguing on SM, also came to know about Article 300 (1), thanks to Sachin Kumar which shows multiple instances where Government was sued because somebody was working in official capacity and did mistakes, malafide or otherwise and it was the state who was made to pay. FWIW, today farmers from Maharashtra, my state arrived at Delhi border where they were also kept at bay. I did come across an infographic which shows how the various states have fared. Most tellingly, is the state of Bihar. It was in 2006 (one of the most backward states) where APMC was taken off. While others have tried to paint a flattering picture of Bihar, they have failed to share that in the interim 15 odd years, there hasn t been any sort of infrastructure created for farmers which is the reason it is still the lowest earner. These are the last available figures we have about the farmer s income. From 2014 to 2020 there hasn t been any update.

Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Household 2013 Copyright GOI,

This concludes just one portion of the bill. I will take other parts of the bill. I may dwell on some other parts as and when I have the time. A cartoon which depicts the current issue

I stand with farmers Copyright Sanitary Panels

Too much democracy Amitabh Kant Yesterday, the Niti Aayog chief Amitabh Kant remarked that we are too much of a democracy at an event called for Atmanirbhar Bharat which is basically a coinage for import substitution. Whether this is desirable or not I have argued and if needed will re-argue the same later as well. What is and was interesting were the gentleman s context, the media reactions and our overall Democracy Index which has been going downhill for quite some years. Now the gentleman who is the Niti Aayog chief and who is supposed to have the ear of the Prime Minister had opined it in an event organized by Swarajya Magazine (a far-right magazine) known to be Islamophobic and all things undemocratic. It has been a target of defundthehate campaign and with good reason. But that s a different story altogether. His full statement was as below

Tough reforms are very difficult in the Indian context, as we are too much of a democracy but the government has shown courage and determination in pushing such reforms across sectors, including mining, coal, labour and agriculture. Niti Aayog chief. The upper quotation remarks and the statement has been from the article in Indian Express which I have linked to. I have archived it as a pdf just in case the link goes dead. Yesterday, after the statement became viraled, tweets of media houses which shared the tweet suddenly become unavailable. Seems too much democracy, became too little democracy all of a sudden. I think Mr. Amitabh Kant didn t visualize as the opposition as well as most people who are on Twitter to share their opinion on the same. Few examples

Too much Democracy copyright Satish Acharya

Too much democracy Illustration and Copyright Alok

Sterlite protest 13 dead, 100 injured Copyright Business Standard too much democracy

Erosion of Democracy V-dem institute Copyright The Hindu Web Team

The last one requires a bit more information. This comes from V-Dem Institute which is an independent research institute based out of Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. I am gonna leave the methods they use for another day as the blog post itself has become rather big/large. Apart from that is the Economists own Democracy Index -2019 Click to access democracy-index-2019.pdf Now for many people, both the V-Dem report and the Economist Index are some sort of attack against India. Doesn t matter that in V-Dem 200+ countries have been taken a variety of indicators and data or the Economist which has data from 150+- countries. Somehow India is supposed to be bigger than all these countries, they do think that other countries data specifically our neighbor China or any other neighbor, those are all accurate. How the dissonance is, has to be gauged from statements of various people. Update 11/12/20 Sadly, the newest V-Dem report marks India as getting into authoritarianism. Gag on Press and Media owners I had shared about the gag on the press especially with respect to western media or reports or anything. This news made its way to straitstimes which normally covers a wide-range of stories covering East Asia vis-a-vis India/South-East Asia. What has also been a big worry that most of the media has been in the hands of a few people. Caravan ran a story on the same in 2016, it has been four years, god only knows what the current situation might be. Any wonder that there is dearth of investigative journalism in India.

India media ownership 2016 Copyright Caravan

Incidentally, a reporter called Akarshan Uppal, who is a reporter on a channel called IBN24 had showecased just few days back how Adani has got land which was shot down for land change use in 2017 to 2020 around 100 acres. There seem to be very less details as to how the land was acquired, whose land it was etc. etc. The reporter was supposedly following a story on drugs on which he was attacked and is now lying in hospital.

Akarshan Uppal Reporter, IBN24 Copyright IBN24

While it would take a whole article/blog post to talk about either Adani or Ambani, in the recent case, the land that has been taken over by Adani is 100 acres and there are private rail lines. And all of this was secret till few days back. The place where these massive godowns/silos have been made are Panipat s Jondhan Kalan and Naultha villages in Haryana. This is Adani AgiLogistics. Almost 7 odd companies have registered and come up in the last couple of years. As can be seen, almost all have come up within the last 2-3 years. Seems to be a lot of coincidence, isn t it?

Personal Anecdote on Data Collection and child marriages in India.

Around 1995 -96 when Internet had started to become a thing in India, there had been quite a few non-profits which were working on various issues. One of those which I initially came in contact with and which I found to be a bit absurd was non-profit which was working in the field of women against Violence. Now it is and was not the concept or the idea which was absurd to me, it was what these women were doing. Instead of the traditional ways in which you counsel women and try and figure out issues, these women were collecting data points from newspapers and magazines. This was way way before data science became a thing in India. They had their own structure where a story about violence against women which would be above the fold would be 5 points, the one below 2.5 points, in inner pages, it would be less and less. Patriarchy at that time was so strong, even today is but at that time it was such, that it felt a waste of time. I did consult them but never said that but did privately feel the above. In hindsight, they were doing the right thing and yet even today crimes against women goes unreported and is suppressed by both State and Central Governments as well as NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau). Interestingly, just few days back, the case against M.J. Akbar by Priya Ramani had taken a back seat and the defamation case by M.J. Akbar was taken forward. Even then, Priya Ramani s counsel s arguments were such that the court wound up in half an hour when they were expecting to do a whole day hearing. The next hearing would be happening today which I will look at in few hours from now. Why Priya Ramani was singled out rather than other tweets may probably be because she is an NRI and most NRI s usually do not want to be part of the bureaucratic Indian court system. This is also the reason that most companies from outside India especially those who are into startups prefer to change ownership, IPR etc. to their own or any country outside India which does make a loss to the exchequer. But this again is a story for another day. At the end, while I did not want to end on a negative note, it seems in many ways status-quo remains. For e.g. 2 years back, a BJP candidate (part of the ruling dispensation) had made a controversy saying that if they win the police won t interfere in child marriages. This is and was in Rajasthan where they have been trying to eradicate it forever. Till date, neither the NHRC (National Human Rights Commission) nor NCW (National Commission for Women) has taken cognizance of the statement. This is our state of democracy.

Farmer Protests While I was hoping to write about RCEP exclusively, just today farmer protests have happened against three farm laws which had been passed by our Govt. about a month ago without consulting anybody. The bills benefit only big business houses at the cost of farmers. This has been amply shared by an open letter to one of the biggest business house which will benefit the most. Now while that is a national experience and what it tells, let me share, some experience from the State I come from, Maharashtra. About 4-5 years back Maharashtra delisted fruit and vegetables from the APMC market. But till date, the APMC market is working, why, the reasons are many. However, what it did was it forced the change to sugarcane, a water guzzling crop much more than previously. This has resulted in lowering the water table in Maharashtra and put them more into debt trap and later they had to commit suicide. Now let us see why the Punjab farmers have been so agitated that they are walking all the way to Delhi. They are right now, somewhere between Haryana-Delhi border. The reason is that because even their experiments with contract farming have not been good. This is why they are struggling to go to Delhi to make their collective voices heard and get the farm bills rolled back. Even the farmers from Gujarat were sued, but because of elections were put back, the intentions though are clear. This has also happened in Uttar Pradesh and for sugarcane and that too by Bajaj Company. At the end of the day, the laws made by the Govt. leaves our farmer at the mercy of big corporations. It is preposterous to believe that the farmer, with their small land holdings will be able to stand up to the Corporation. Add to that, they cannot go to Court. It is the SDM (Sub-Divisonal Magistrate) who will decide on the matters and has the last word. If this is allowed, in a couple of years there will be only few farmers or corporations who would have large hand-holdings, and they would be easily co-opted by the Government in power. Just in A gentleman who turned off water cannon being shot at farmers has been charged for murder Currently, the Government procures rice in vast quantities and the farmers are assured at least some basic income, in the states of Punjab and Haryana

Procurement of Rice by Various States

Recently there was also an article in Indian Express which shares the farmer s apprehensions and does share that it s a complex problem with no easy solutions. The solution can only be dialogue between the two parties. This was also shared by Vivek Kaul, who is far more knowledgable than me on the subject and made a long read on the subject.

The Canada Way Recently, while sparring on the Internet, came to know of the Canada way. Here, the Government makes the farmer a corporation and the Government helps them. But the Canada way seems to largely work as the Canadian Government owns the majority of the lands in question. And yes, Indians have benefited from it but that is also due to a. the currency differential between Canadian dollar and Indian Rupee and the 99-year land lease. There may be other advantages that the Canadian Government bestows and that is the reason possibly that most Punjabi farmers go to Canada and UK to farm. While looking at it, I also came across the situation in the United States and it seems the situation there seems to be becoming even more grim.

RCEP RCEP stands for Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. We were supposed to be part of this partnership. Now why didn t we join, for two reasons, our judicial infrastructure is the worst. It took 8 years to decide on a tax retrospective case (Vodafone) and that too finally outside India. And that decision, by no means an end. The other thing is all those who have joined RCEP have lesser duties, tariffs then India. What this means is that they are much more competitive than India. While there is fear that perhaps that China may take over its assets as it has done with few countries around the world, the opportunity for those countries was too good to pass up even with the dangers. But, then even India has taken loans from the Asian Infrastructure Investment (AIIB) Bank where China is the biggest shareholder. So it doesn t make sense to be insecure on that front. And again, it is up to India or any other sovereign country to decide to take loans from some country, some multilateral organization or any other way and on what terms.

What China has done and doing is similar to what IMF (being used primarily by the United States) had done in its past. The only difference is that time it was the United States, now it is China. America co-opted Governments, and got assets, China doing the same, no difference in tactics, more or less the same. There has also been a somewhat interesting paper which discusses how the RCEP may unfold in different circumstances. In short, it tells that the partners will benefit, some more than others. It also does compare the RCEP to CPTPP (The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership). While the study is a bit academic in nature as the United States has walked out and the new president-elect Joe Biden hasn t made any moves and is unlikely to make any moves as there is deep divide and resentment about multilateral trade partnerships domestically within the United States. This news and understanding was quite shocking to me as it shows that unlike the United States of the past, which was supposed to be a beacon of capitalism and seemed to enjoy capitalism, it seems to be an opportunist only. There is also this truth that under Biden, there is only so many things on which he would need and can spend his political capital on.

Statistica Chart of differences between Republicans and Democrats

As can be seen, economy at least for the democrats, this time around is pretty far round the corner. He has a host of battles and would have to choose which to fight and which to ignore. In the end, we are left to our own devices. At the moment, India does not know when it s economy will recover

PTI News, Nov 27, 2020

There has been another worrying bit of news, now all newspapers will need to get some sort of permission, certification from Govt. of India about any news of the world. This is harking back on the 1970 s, 1980 s era

Gradle and Kotlin in Debian Few months back, I was looking at where Gradle and Kotlin were in Debian. They still seem to be a work in progress. I found the Android-tools salsa repo which tells me the state of things. While there has been movement on both, a bit more on Kotlin, it still seems it would take a while. For kotlin, the wiki page is most helpful as well as the android-tool salsa kotlin board page . Ironically, some of the more important info. is shared in a blog post which ideally should also have been reflected in kotlin board page . I did see some of the bugs so know it s pretty much dependency hell. I can only congratulate and encourage Samyak Jain and Raman Sarda. I also played a bit with the google-android-emulator-installer which is basically a hook which downloads the binary from google. I do not know what the plans are, but perhaps in the future they also might be build locally, who knows. Just sharing/stating here so it s part of my notes whenever I wanna see what s happening

Women in India I am sure some of you might remember my blog post from last year. It is almost close to a year 2020 now and the question to be asked is, has much changed ? After a lot or hue and cry the Government of India shared the NCRB data of crimes against women and caste crimes. The report shared that crimes against women had risen by 7.3% in a year, similarly crimes against lower castes also went by similar percentage . With the 2020 pandemic, I am sure the number has gone up more. And there is a possibility that just like last year, next year the Government would cite the pandemic and say no data. This year they have done it for migrant deaths during lockdown , for job losses due to the pandemic and so on and so forth. So, it will be no surprise if the Govt. says about NCRB data next year as well. Although media has been showing some in spite of the regular threats to the journalists as shared in the last blog post. There is also data that shows that women participation in labor force has fallen sharply especially in the last few years and the Government seems to have no neither idea nor do they seem to care for the same. There aren t any concrete plans to bring back the balance even a little bit.

Few Court judgements But all hope is not lost. There have been a couple of good judgements, one from the CIC (Chief Information Commissioner) wherein in specific cases a wife can know salary details of her husband, especially if there is some kind of maintenance due from the husband. There was so much of hue and cry against this order that it was taken down from the livelaw RTI corner. Luckily, I had downloaded it, hence could upload and share it. Another one was a case/suit about a legally matured women who had decided to marry without parental consent. In this case, the Delhi High Court had taken women s side and stated she can marry whom she wants. Interestingly, about a week back Uttar Pradesh (most notorious about crime against women) had made laws called Love Jihad and 2 -3 states have followed them. The idea being to create an atmosphere of hate against Muslims and women have no autonomy about what they want. This is when in a separate suit/case against Sudharshan TV (a far-right leaning channel promoting hate against Muslims) , the Government of India itself put an affidavit stating that Tablighis (a sect of Muslims who came from Malaysia to India for religious discourse and assembly) were not responsible for dissemination of the virus and some media has correctly portrayed the same. Of course, those who are on the side of the Govt. on this topic think a traitor has written. They also thought that the Govt. had taken a wrong approach but couldn t tell of a better approach to the matter. There are too many matters in the Supreme Court of women asking for justice to tell all here but two instances share how the SC has been buckling under the stress of late, one is a webinar which was chaired by Justice Subramaniam where he shared how the executive is using judicial appointments to do what it wants. The gulf between the executive and the SC has been since Indira Gandhi days, especially the judicial orders which declared that the Emergency is valid by large, it has fallen much more recently and the executive has been muscling in which have resulted in more regressive decisions than progressive.

This observation is also in tune with another study which came to the same result although using data. The raw data from the study could give so much more than what has been shared. For e.g. as an idea for the study, of the ones cited, how many have been in civil law, personal law, criminal or constitutional law. This would give a better understanding of things. Also what is shocking is none of our court orders have been cited in the west in the recent past, when there used to be a time when the west used to take guidance from Indian jurisprudence sometimes and cite the orders to reach similar conclusion or if not conclusion at least be used as a precedent. I guess those days are over.

Government giving Corporate ownership to Private Sector Banks There was an Internal Working Group report to review extant ownership guidelines and Corporate Structure for Indian Private Sector Banks. This is the actual title of the report. Now there were and are concerns about the move which were put forth by Dr. Raghuram Rajan and Viral Acharya. While Dr. Rajan had been the 23rd Governor of RBI from 4th September 2013 to 4th September 2016. His most commendable work which largely is unknown to most people was the report A hundred small steps which you buy from sage publications. Viral Acharya was the deputy governor from 23rd January 2017 23rd July 2019. Mr. Acharya just recently published his book Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India which can be bought from the same publication house as well. They also wrote a three page article stating that does India need corporates in banking? More interestingly, he shares two points from history both world war 1 and world war 2. In both cases, the allies had to cut down the businesses who had owned banks. In Germany, it was the same and in Japan, the zaibatsu s dissolution, both of which were needed to make the world safe again. Now, if we don t learn lessons from history it is our fault, not history s. What was also shared that this idea was taken up in 2013 but was put into cold-storage. He also commented on the pressure on RBI as all co-operative banks have come under its ambit in the last few months. RBI has had a patchy record, especially in the last couple of years, with big scams like ILFS, Yes Bank, PMC Bank, Laxmi Vilas Bank among others. The LVB Bank being the most recent one. If new banking licenses have to be given they can be given to good NBFC s who have been in the market for a long time and have shown maturity while dealing with public money. What is the hurry for giving it to Corporate/business houses ? There are many other good points in the report with which both Mr. Rajan and Mr. Acharya are in agreement and do hope the other points/suggestions/proposals are implemented. There was and is an interesting report by Reserve Bank of India called financial sector legislative reforms commission report volume 1 . If and when it gets deleted from RBI, I have put up a copy at my WordPress account, so we shall always have one. Interestingly, while looking through the people who were part of the committee was a somewhat familiar name Murmu . This is perhaps the first time you see people from a sort of political background being in what should be a cut and dry review which have people normally from careers in finance or Accounts. It also turns out that only one person was in favor of banks going to corporates, all the rest were against. It seems that the specific person hadn t heard the terms self-lending , connected-lending and conflict of interest. One of the more interesting comments in the report is if a corporate has a bank, then why would he go to Switzerland, he would just wash the money in his own bank. And if banks were to become to big to fail like it happened in the United States, it would be again private gains, public losses. There was also a Washington Post article which shares some of the reasons that Indian banks fail. I think we need to remind ourselves once again, how things can become
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gK3s5j7PgA

Positive News at end At the end I do not want to end on a sour notes, hence sharing a YouTube channel of Films Division India where you can see of the very classic works and interviews of some of the greats in Indian art cinema.

https://www.youtube.com/user/FilmsDivision/videos Also sharing a bit of funny story I came to know about youtube-dl, apparently it was taken off from github but thanks to efforts from EFF, Hackernews and others, it is now back in action.

In some ways it is sad and interesting to see how personal liberty is viewed in India. And how it differs from those having the highest fame and power can get a different kind of justice then the rest cannot.

Arnab Goswami This particular gentleman is a class apart. He is the editor as well as Republic TV, a right-leaning channel which demonizes the minority, women whatever is antithesis to the Central Govt. of India. As a result there have been a spate of cases against him in the past few months. But surprisingly, in each of them he got hearing the day after the suit was filed. This is unique in Indian legal history so much so that a popular legal site which publishes on-going cases put up a post sharing how he was getting prompt hearings. That post itself needs to be updated as there have been 3 more hearings which have been done back to back for him. This is unusual as there have been so many cases pending for the SC attention, some arguably more important than this gentleman . So many precedents have been set which will send a wrong message. The biggest one, that even though a trial is taking place in the sessions court (below High Court) the SC can interject on matters. What this will do to the morale of both lawyers as well as judges of the various Sessions Court is a matter of speculation and yet as shared unprecedented. The saddest part was when Justice Chandrachud said

Justice Chandrachud If you don t like a channel then don t watch it. 11th November 2020 .

This is basically giving a free rope to hate speech. How can a SC say like that ? And this is the Same Supreme Court which could not take two tweets from Shri Prashant Bhushan when he made remarks against the judiciary .

J&K pleas in Supreme Court pending since August 2019 (Abrogation 370) After abrogation of 370, citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, the population of which is 13.6 million people including 4 million Hindus have been stuck with reduced rights and their land being taken away due to new laws. Many of the Hindus which regionally are a minority now rue the fact that they supported the abrogation of 370A . Imagine, a whole state whose answers and prayers have not been heard by the Supreme Court and the people need to move a prayer stating the same.

100 Journalists, activists languishing in Jail without even a hearing 55 Journalists alone have been threatened, booked and in jail for reporting of pandemic . Their fault, they were bring the irregularities, corruption made during the pandemic early months. Activists such as Sudha Bharadwaj, who giving up her American citizenship and settling to fight for tribals is in jail for 2 years without any charges. There are many like her, There are several more petitions lying in the Supreme Court, for e.g. Varavara Rao, not a single hearing from last couple of years, even though he has taken part in so many national movements including the emergency as well as part-responsible for creation of Telengana state out of Andhra Pradesh .

Then there is Devangana kalita who works for gender rights. Similar to Sudha Bharadwaj, she had an opportunity to go to UK and settle here. She did her master s and came back. And now she is in jail for the things that she studied. While she took part in Anti-CAA sittings, none of her speeches were incendiary but she still is locked up under UAPA (Unlawful Practises Act) . I could go on and on but at the moment these should suffice.

Petitions for Hate Speech which resulted in riots in Delhi are pending, Citizen s Amendment Act (controversial) no hearings till date. All of the best has been explained in a newspaper article which articulates perhaps all that I wanted to articulate and more. It is and was amazing to see how in certain cases Article 32 is valid and in many it is not. Also a fair reading of Justice Bobde s article tells you a lot how the SC is functioning. I would like to point out that barandbench along with livelawindia makes it easier for never non-lawyers and public to know how arguments are done in court, what evidences are taken as well as give some clue about judicial orders and judgements. Both of these resources are providing an invaluable service and more often than not, free of charge.

Student Suicide and High Cost of Education
For quite sometime now, the cost of education has been shooting up. While I have visited this topic earlier as well, recently a young girl committed suicide because she was unable to pay the fees as well as additional costs due to pandemic. Further investigations show that this is the case with many of the students who are unable to buy laptops. Now while one could think it is limited to one college then it would be wrong. It is almost across all India and this will continue for months and years. People do know that the pandemic is going to last a significant time and it would be a long time before R value becomes zero . Even the promising vaccine from Pfizer need constant refrigeration which is sort of next to impossible in India. It is going to make things very costly.

Last Nail on Indian Media Just today the last nail on India has been put. Thankfully Freedom Gazette India did a much better job so just pasting that

Information and Broadcasting Ministry bringing OTT services as well as news within its ambit.

With this, projects like Scam 1992, The Harshad Mehta Story or Bad Boy Billionaires:India, Test Case, Delhi Crime, Laakhon Mein Ek etc. etc. such kind of series, investigative journalism would be still-births. Many of these web-series also shared tales of woman empowerment while at the same time showed some of the hard choices that women had to contend to live with. Even western media may be censored where it finds the political discourse not to its liking. There had been so many accounts of Mr. Ravish Kumar, the winner of Ramon Magsaysay, how in his shows the electricity was cut in many places. I too have been the victim when the BJP governed in Maharashtra as almost all Puneities experienced it. Light would go for just half or 45 minutes at the exact time. There is another aspect to it. The U.S. elections showed how independent media was able to counter Mr. Trump s various falsehoods and give rise to alternative ideas which lead the team of Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Biden now being the President-elect while Kamala Harris being the vice-president elect. Although the journey to the white house seems as tough as before. Let s see what happens. Hopefully 2021 will bring in some good news. Update On 27th November 2020 Martin who runs the planet got an e-mail/notice by a Mr. Nikhil Sethi who runs the wikibio.com property. Mr. Sethi asked to remove the link pointing Devangana Kalita from my blog post to his site as he has used the no follow link. On inquiring further, the gentleman stated that it is an Updated mandate (his exact quote) from Google algorithm. To further understand the issue, I went to SERP as they are one of the more known ones on the subject. I also looked it up on Google as well. Found that the gentleman was BSing the whole time. The page basically talks about weightage of a page/site and authoritativeness which is known and yet highly contested ideas. In any case, the point for me was for whatever reason (could be fear, could be something else entirely), Mr. Sethi did not want me to link the content. Hence, I have complied above. I could have dragged it out but I do not wish Mr. Sethi any ill-being or/and further harm unduly and unintentionally caused by me. Hence, have taken down the link.

First of all, congratulations to all those who got us 2022 Debconf, so we will finally have a debconf in India. There is of course, lot of work to be done between now and then. For those who would be looking forward to visit India and especially Kochi I would suggest you to hear this enriching tale I am sorry I used youtube link but it is too good a podcast not to be shared. Those who don t want youtube can use the invidio.us link for the same as shared below. https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=BvjgKuKmnQ4 I am sure there are lot more details, questions, answers etc. but would direct them gently to Praveen, Shruti, Balasankar and the rest who are from Kochi to answer if you have any questions about that history.

National Science Day, GMRT 2020 First, as always, we are and were grateful to both NCRA as well as GMRT for taking such good care of us. Even though Akshat was not around, probably getting engaged, a few of us were there. About 6-7 from the Mozilla Nasik while the rest representing the foss community. Here is a small picture which commentrates the event

National Science Day, GMRT 2020

While there is and was a lot to share about the event. For e.g. Akshay had bought RPI- Zero as well as RPI-2 (Raspberry Pi s ) and showed some things. He had also bought up a Debian stable live drive with persistence although the glare from the sun was too much that we couldn t show it to clearly to students. This was also the case with RPI but still we shared what and how much we could. Maybe next year, we either ask them to have double screens or give us dark room so we can showcase things much better. We did try playing with contrast and all but it didn t have much of an effect . Of course in another stall few students had used RPI s as part of their projects so at times we did tell some of the newbies to go to those stalls and see and ask about those projects so they would have a much wider experience of things. The Mozilla people were pushing VR as well as Mozilla lite the browser for the mobile. We also gossiped quite a bit. I shared about indicatelts , a third-party certificate extension although I dunno if I should file a wnpp about it or not. We didn t have a good experience of when I had put an RFP (Request for Package) which was accepted for an extension which had similar functionality which we later come to know was sharing the sites people were using the extension to call home and share both the URL and the IP Address they were using it from. Sadly, didn t leave a good taste in mouth

Delhi Riots One thing I have been disappointed with is the lack of general awareness about things especially in the youth. We have people who didn t know that for e.g. in the Delhi riots which happened recently the law and order (Police) lies with Home Minister of India, Amit Shah. This is perhaps the only capital in the world which has its own Chief Minister but doesn t have any say on its law and order. And this has been the case for last 70 years i.e. since independance. The closest I know so far is the UK but they too changed their tune in 2012. India and especially Delhi seems to be in a time-capsule which while being dysfunctional somehow is made to work. In many ways, it s three body or a body split into three personalities which often makes governance a messy issue but that probably is a topic for another day. In fact, scroll had written a beautiful editorial that full statehood for Delhi was not only Arvind Kejriwal s call (AAP) but also something that both BJP as well as Congress had asked in the past. In fact, nothing about the policing is in AAP s power. All salaries, postings, transfers of police personnel everything is done by the Home Ministry, so if any blame has to be given it has to be given to the Home Ministry for the same.

American Capitalism and Ventilators America had been having a history of high cost healthcare as can be seen in this edition of USA today from 2017 . The Affordable Care Act was signed as a law by President Obama in 2010 which Mr. Trump curtailed when he came into power couple of years back. An estimated 80,000 people died due to seasonal flu in 2018-19 . Similarly, anywhere between 24-63,000 have supposed to have died from Last October to February-March this year. Now if the richest country can t take care of their population which is 1/3rd of the population of this country while at the same time United States has thrice the area that India has. This I am sharing as seasonal flu also strikes the elderly as well as young children more than adults. So in one senses, the vulnerable groups overlap although from some of the recent stats, for Covid-19 even those who are 20+ are also vulnerable but that s another story altogether. If you see the CDC graph of the seasonal flu it is clear that American health experts knew about it. One another common factor which joins both the seasonal flu and covid is both need ventilators for the most serious cases. So, in 2007 it was decided that the number of ventilators needed to be ramped up, they had approximately 62k ventilators at that point in time all over U.S. The U.S. in 2010, asked for bids and got bid from a small californian company called Newport Medic Instruments. The price of the ventilators was approximately INR 700000 at 2010 prices, while Newport said they would be able to mass-produce at INR 200000 at 2010 prices. The company got the order and they started designing the model which needed to be certified by FDA. By 2011, they got the product ready when a big company called Covidgen bought Newport Medic and shutdown the project. This was shared in a press release in 2012. The whole story was broken by New York Times again, just a few days ago which highlighted how America s capitalism rough shod over public health and put people s life unnecessarily in jeopardy. If those new-age ventilators would have been a reality then not just U.S. but India and many other countries would have bought the ventilators as every county has same/similar needs but are unable to pay the high cost which in many cases would be passed on to their citizens either as price of service, or by raising taxes or a mixture of both with public being none the wiser. Due to dearth of ventilators and specialized people to operate it and space, there is possibility that many countries including India may have to make tough choices like Italian doctors had to make as to who to give ventilator to and have the mental and emotional guilt which would be associated with the choices made.

Some science coverage about diseases in wire and other publications Since Covid coverage broke out, the wire has been bringing various reports of India s handling of various epidemics, mysteries, some solved, some still remaining unsolved due to lack of interest or funding or both. The Nipah virus has been amply discussed in the movie Virus (2019) which I shared in the last blog post and how easily it could have been similar to Italy in Kerala. Thankfully, only 24 people including a nurse succumbed to that outbreak as shared in the movie. I had shared about Kerala nurses professionalism when I was in hospital couple of years back. It s no wonder that their understanding of hygeine and nursing procedures are a cut above the rest hence they are sought after not just in India but world-over including US and UK and the middle-east. Another study on respitory illness was bought to my attention by my friend Pavithran.

Possibility of extended lockdown in India There was talk in the media of extended lockdown or better put an environment is being created so that an extended lockdown can be done. This is probably in part due to a mathematical model and its derivatives shared by two Indian-origin Cambridge scholars who predict that a minimum 49 days lockdown may be necessary to flatten the covid curve about a week back.

Predictions of the outcome of the current 21-day lockdown (Source: Rajesh Singh, R. Adhikari, Cambridge University)

Alternative lockdown strategies suggested by the Cambridge model (Source: Rajesh Singh, R. Adhikari, Cambridge University)

India caving to US pressure on Hydroxychloroquine While there has been lot of speculation in U.S. about Hydroxychloroquine as the wonder cure, last night Mr. Trump threatened India in a response to a reporter that Mr. Modi has to say no for Hydroxychloroquine and there may be retaliations.

As shared before if youtube is not your cup you can see the same on invidio.us https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=YP-ewgoJPLw Now while there have been several instances in the past of U.S. trying to bully India, going all the way back to 1954. In fact, in recent memory, there were sanctions on India by US under Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government (BJP) 1998 but he didn t buckle under the pressure and now we see our current PM taking down our own notification from a day ago and not just sharing Hydroxychloroquine but also Paracetemol to other countries so it would look as if India is sharing with other countries. Keep in mind, that India, Brazil haven t seen eye to eye on trade agreements of late and Paracetemol prices have risen in India. The price rise has been because the API (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients) for the same come from China where the supply chain will take time to be fixed and we would also have to open up, although should we, should we not is another question altogether. I talk about supply chains as lean supply chains were the talk since late 90 s when the Japanese introduced Just-in-time manufacturing which lead to lean supply chains as well as lot of outsourcing as consequence. Of course, the companies saved money but at the cost of flexibility and how this model was perhaps flawed was shared by a series of articles in Economist as early as 2004 when there were lot of shocks to that model and would be exaberated since then. There have been frequent shocks to these fragile ecosystem more since 2008 after the financial meltdown and this would put more companies out of business than ever before. The MSME sector in India had already been severely impacted first by demonetization and then by the horrendous implementation of GST whose cries can be heard from all sectors. Also the frequent changing of GST taxes has made markets jumpy and investors unsure. With judgements such as retrospective taxes, AGR (Adjusted Gross Revenue) etc. it made not only the international investors scared, but also domestic investors. The flight of the capital has been noticeable. This I had shared before when Indian Government shared about LRS report which it hasn t since then. In fact Outlook Business had an interesting article about it where incidentally it talked about localcircles, a community networking platform where you get to know of lot of things and whom I am also a member of. At the very end I apologize for not sharing the blog post before but then I was feeling down but then I m not the only one.