Groundwork and basic code clean-up: As the original V3D-kernel interface allowed only one semaphore, V3DV resorted to booleans to translate multiple semaphores into one. Consequently, if a command buffer batch had at least one semaphore, it needed to wait on all jobs submitted complete before starting its execution. So, instead of just boolean, we created and changed structs that store semaphores information to accept the actual list of wait semaphores.

• v3dv: drop unused variable on handle_set_event_cpu_job
• v3dv: wrap wait semaphores info in v3dv_submit_info_semaphores
• v3dv: store wait semaphores in event_wait_cpu_job_info

Expose multisync kernel interface to the driver: In the two commits below, we basically updated the DRM V3D interface from that one defined in the kernel and verified if the multisync capability is available for use.

• drm-uapi/v3d: extend interface for multiple semaphores support
• v3dv: check multiple semaphores capability

Handle multiple semaphores for all GPU job types: At this point, we were only changing the submission design to consider multiple wait semaphores. Before supporting multisync, V3DV was waiting for the last job submitted to be signaled when at least one wait semaphore was defined, even when serialization wasn t required. V3DV handle GPU jobs according to the GPU queue in which they are submitted:

• Control List (CL) for binning and rendering
• Texture Formatting Unit (TFU)
• Compute Shader Dispatch (CSD)

Therefore, we changed their submission setup to do jobs submitted to any GPU queues able to handle more than one wait semaphores.

• v3dv: enable multiple semaphores on cl submission
• v3dv: enable multiple semaphores for tfu job
• v3dv: enable multiple semaphores for csd job
• v3dv: enable GPU jobs to signal multiple semaphores

These commits created all mechanisms to set arrays of wait and signal semaphores for GPU job submissions:

• Checking the conditions to define the wait_stage.
• Wrapping them in a multisync extension.
• According to the kernel interface (described in the previous blog post), configure the generic extension as a multisync extension.

Finally, we extended the ability of GPU jobs to handle multiple signal semaphores, but at this point, no GPU job is actually in charge of signaling them. With this in place, we could rework part of the code that tracks CPU and GPU job completions by verifying the GPU status and threads spawned by Event jobs.

Rework the QueueWaitIdle mechanism to track the syncobj of the last job submitted in each queue: As we had only single in/out syncobj interfaces for semaphores, we used a single last_job_sync to synchronize job dependencies of the previous submission. Although the DRM scheduler guarantees the order of starting to execute a job in the same queue in the kernel space, the order of completion isn t predictable. On the other hand, we still needed to use syncobjs to follow job completion since we have event threads on the CPU side. Therefore, a more accurate implementation requires last_job syncobjs to track when each engine (CL, TFU, and CSD) is idle. We also needed to keep the driver working on previous versions of v3d kernel-driver with single semaphores, then we kept tracking ANY last_job_sync to preserve the previous implementation.

• v3dv: track submitted jobs by GPU queue type

Rework synchronization and submission design to let the jobs handle wait and signal semaphores: With multiple semaphores support, the conditions for waiting and signaling semaphores changed accordingly to the particularities of each GPU job (CL, CSD, TFU) and CPU job restrictions (Events, CSD indirect, etc.). In this sense, we redesigned V3DV semaphores handling and job submissions for command buffer batches in vkQueueSubmit. We scrutinized possible scenarios for submitting command buffer batches to change the original implementation carefully. It resulted in three commits more:

• v3dv: handle wait semaphores in the first job by queue

We keep track of whether we have submitted a job to each GPU queue (CSD, TFU, CL) and a CPU job for each command buffer. We use syncobjs to track the last job submitted to each GPU queue and a flag that indicates if this represents the beginning of a command buffer. The first GPU job submitted to a GPU queue in a command buffer should wait on wait semaphores. The first CPU job submitted in a command buffer should call v3dv_QueueWaitIdle() to do the waiting and ignore semaphores (because it is waiting for everything). If the job is not the first but has the serialize flag set, it should wait on the completion of all last job submitted to any GPU queue before running. In practice, it means using syncobjs to track the last job submitted by queue and add these syncobjs as job dependencies of this serialized job.

• v3dv: process signal semaphores in the very last job

If this job is the last job of a command buffer batch, it may be used to signal semaphores if this command buffer batch has only one type of GPU job (because we have guarantees of execution ordering). Otherwise, we emit a no-op job just to signal semaphores. It waits on the completion of all last jobs submitted to any GPU queue and then signal semaphores. Note: We changed this approach to correctly deal with ordering changes caused by event threads at some point. Whenever we have an event job in the command buffer, we cannot use the last job in the last command buffer assumption. We have to wait all event threads complete to signal

• v3dv: signal fence when all submitted jobs complete execution

After submitting all command buffers, we emit a no-op job to wait on all last jobs by queue completion and signal fence. Note: at some point, we changed this approach to correct deal with ordering changes caused by event threads, as mentioned before.

Final considerations With many changes and many rounds of reviews, the patchset was merged. After more validations and code review, we polished and fixed the implementation together with external contributions:

• v3dv: fix double free error when releasing sems_info resources
• v3dv: enable multisync in the simulator
• v3dv: Add missing unlocks on errors.
• v3dv: don t submit noop job if there is nothing to wait on or signal

Also, multisync capabilities enabled us to add new features to V3DV and switch the driver to the common synchronization and submission framework:

• v3dv: expose support for semaphore imports

  This was waiting for multisync support in the v3d kernel, which is already available. Exposing this feature however enabled a few more CTS tests that exposed pre-existing bugs in the user-space driver so we fix those here before exposing the feature.

• v3dv: Switch to the common submit framework

  This should give you emulated timeline semaphores for free and kernel-assisted sharable timeline semaphores for cheap once you have the kernel interface wired in.

We used a set of games to ensure no performance regression in the new implementation. For this, we used GFXReconstruct to capture Vulkan API calls when playing those games. Then, we compared results with and without multisync caps in the kernelspace and also enabling multisync on v3dv. We didn t observe any compromise in performance, but improvements when replaying scenes of vkQuake game.

$ sudo apt install ubuntu-dev-tools

$ mkdir mesa-downgrade; cd mesa-downgrade

$ pull-lp-debs mesa 21.3.5-1ubuntu2

• pull-lp-source downloads source package from Launchpad.
• pull-lp-debs downloads debs package(s) from Launchpad.
• pull-lp-ddebs downloads dbgsym/ddebs package(s) from Launchpad.
• pull-lp-udebs downloads udebs package(s) from Launchpad.
• pull-debian-* same as pull-lp-* but for Debian packages.

$ sudo apt install --only-upgrade --mark-auto ./*.deb

$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

$ sudo apt-mark hold

$ cd .. ; rm -ri mesa-downgrade

$ sudo apt install libegl-mesa0/jammy

$ apt list --installed --all-versions  grep local] --after-context 1

John Grisham The King of Torts Lots of things have been happening and I have been unable to be on top of things. There are so many things that happen and keep on happening and a lot of it is just not in control. For those who are watching Brexit, India is going through the same/similar phenomena just without Brexit. I would not like to delve much into Indian happenings as there is no sweet story to tell. Mum is in hospital (diabetic foot) so a lot of time to read books. So I have been making use of the time and at the same time learning or making connections from what I know of the history of the world which goes on enriching what I read all the time. For e.g. in this book, opens up with people who are on Crack. Now while the book is set in 2003, it is still relevant today for a lot of things. There have been rumors and whatnot that the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan supplied a lot of cocaine to black folks in the early 1980s. While that has never been proved, it has been proved somewhat that the CIA and even people in the state department were part of providing crack cocaine to African Americans (as they refer to blacks) in those days. Whether this was because of black power rising or non-profits like ACLU or other organizations is beyond me. I had also read that the GOP (Republicans/Grand Old Party) in the 1970s itself when computers became fast and could do a lot of processing, came to know if education would be as it is, then soon they would no voters. hence they decided to defund education in America, the end result being massive education loans to prospective students and perhaps partly the reason why China produces more than enough STEM graduates than the total number of Americans who become graduates. It is a shame nonetheless, that education in the U.S. is never top . This is somewhat from a Republican perspective. That is also the reason they are much anti-science.

Tort Cases India doesn t have either class-action suits or tort cases. But before we go headlong, this is what tort means. The book however is not about general tort cases but medical tort cases. The idea is that medical companies often produce medicines claiming they solve x or y issues but more often than not they take short-cuts to get approval from FDA and other regulators. And sooner or later those medicines can and do have harmful effects on the body, sometimes resulting in death. One of the more interesting articles that I read and probably also shared is the work done by Mr. Rob Bilott. While it is a typical David and Goliath story once you read the book, you realize that there are and were many difficulties in Mr. Rob s path that are never fully appreciated or even worked out. The biggest issue is the 8 years that he paid out of his own pocket to get the hundreds and thousands of people tested. How many of us would do that? And this is before proving causation of any disease, illness or anything to a particular environment, pollution etc. is hard even then and even now. Whatever money the victims receive afterward and whatever went to Mr. Rob Bilott would never compensate for the stress faced by him. And lawyers have to be careful, if they ask too little, they are not hurting the company and there is no change in its behavior. If they ask too much, the company can declare Chapter 11, bankruptcy so they have to keep the balance. There is also a lot of greed shown by the tort lawyer and while at the end he does tell about a company s nefarious activities that he suspects he could share his opinion only after giving up his law career. There is and was talk of tort-reform in the book but as can be seen if you reform tort there is just no way to punish such companies but that is in the U.S. There is also some observations that I have shared over the years, for e.g. Europe bans far more drugs than the U.S. does. A major part of it is perhaps due to the fact that Europe has 26/27 independent medical regulators and one country bans medicine for one or the other reason, the rest of Europe also bans the same. In the U.S. it is only the FDA. I have read they have had both funding and staffing issues for years and this is from before the pandemic. The Indian regulators are much worse. One could follow Priyanka Pulla s articles in Mint and others where she has shared how the regulator is corrupt and lazy and a combo of both. And all of this is besides how doctors are corrupted in India by marketing executives of pharma companies. That would be a whole article in itself. In short, when you read this book, there are so many thoughts that come alive when you are reading the book. The sad part is the book doesn t offer any solutions at all. John Grisham s books are usually legal thrillers and courtroom exchanges, this one though is and was very different. This one sadly doesn t take one to any conclusion apart from the fact that we live in an imperfect world and there don t seem to be any solutions. This was even shared by Rep. Katie Porter in her pinned tweet. The Abbvie s of the world will continue to take common people like you and me for a ride.

Benchmark setup All programs were tested against a Dovecot 1:2.3.13+dfsg1-2 server, running Debian bullseye. The client is a Purism 13v4 laptop with a Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB NVMe drive. The server is a custom build with a AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU, and a RAID-1 array made of two NVMe drives (Intel SSDPEKNW010T8 and WDC WDS100T2B0C). The mail spool I am testing against has almost 400k messages and takes 13GB of disk space:

$ notmuch count --exclude=false
372758
$ du -sh --exclude xapian Maildir
13G Maildir

The baseline we are comparing against is SMD (syncmaildir) which performs the sync in about 7-8 seconds locally (3.5 seconds for each push/pull command) and about 10-12 seconds remotely. Anything close to that or better is good enough. I do not have recent numbers for a SMD full sync baseline, but the setup documentation mentions 20 minutes for a full sync. That was a few years ago, and the spool has obviously grown since then, so that is not a reliable baseline. A baseline for a full sync might be also set with rsync, which copies files at nearly 40MB/s, or 317Mb/s!

anarcat@angela:tmp(main)$ time rsync -a --info=progress2 --exclude xapian  shell.anarc.at:Maildir/ Maildir/
 12,647,814,731 100%   37.85MB/s    0:05:18 (xfr#394981, to-chk=0/395815)    
72.38user 106.10system 5:19.59elapsed 55%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 15988maxresident)k
8816inputs+26305112outputs (0major+50953minor)pagefaults 0swaps

That is 5 minutes to transfer the entire spool. Incremental syncs are obviously pretty fast too:

anarcat@angela:tmp(main)$ time rsync -a --info=progress2 --exclude xapian  shell.anarc.at:Maildir/ Maildir/
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/395815)    
1.42user 0.81system 0:03.31elapsed 67%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 14100maxresident)k
120inputs+0outputs (3major+12709minor)pagefaults 0swaps

As an extra curiosity, here's the performance with tar, pretty similar with rsync, minus incremental which I cannot be bothered to figure out right now:

anarcat@angela:tmp(main)$ time ssh shell.anarc.at tar --exclude xapian -cf - Maildir/   pv -s 13G   tar xf - 
56.68user 58.86system 5:17.08elapsed 36%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 8764maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+7266minor)pagefaults 0swaps
12,1GiO 0:05:17 [39,0MiB/s] [===================================================================> ] 92%

Interesting that rsync manages to almost beat a plain tar on file transfer, I'm actually surprised by how well it performs here, considering there are many little files to transfer. (But then again, this maybe is exactly where rsync shines: while tar needs to glue all those little files together, rsync can just directly talk to the other side and tell it to do live changes. Something to look at in another article maybe?) Since both ends are NVMe drives, those should easily saturate a gigabit link. And in fact, a backup of the server mail spool achieves much faster transfer rate on disks:

anarcat@marcos:~$ tar fc - Maildir   pv -s 13G > Maildir.tar
15,0GiO 0:01:57 [ 131MiB/s] [===================================] 115%

That's 131Mibyyte per second, vastly faster than the gigabit link. The client has similar performance:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ tar fc - Maildir   pv -s 17G > Maildir.tar
16,2GiO 0:02:22 [ 116MiB/s] [==================================] 95%

So those disks should be able to saturate a gigabit link, and they are not the bottleneck on fast links. Which begs the question of what is blocking performance of a similar transfer over the gigabit link, but that's another question altogether, because no sync program ever reaches the above performance anyways. Finally, note that when I migrated to SMD, I wrote a small performance comparison that could be interesting here. It show SMD to be faster than OfflineIMAP, but not as much as we see here. In fact, it looks like OfflineIMAP slowed down significantly since then (May 2018), but this could be due to my larger mail spool as well.

mbsync The isync (AKA mbsync) project is written in C and supports syncing Maildir and IMAP folders, with possibly multiple replicas. I haven't tested this but I suspect it might be possible to sync between two IMAP servers as well. It supports partial mirorrs, message flags, full folder support, and "trash" functionality.

Complex configuration file I started with this .mbsyncrc configuration file:

SyncState *
Sync New ReNew Flags
IMAPAccount anarcat
Host imap.anarc.at
User anarcat
PassCmd "pass imap.anarc.at"
SSLType IMAPS
CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
IMAPStore anarcat-remote
Account anarcat
MaildirStore anarcat-local
# Maildir/top/sub/sub
#SubFolders Verbatim
# Maildir/.top.sub.sub
SubFolders Maildir++
# Maildir/top/.sub/.sub
# SubFolders legacy
# The trailing "/" is important
#Path ~/Maildir-mbsync/
Inbox ~/Maildir-mbsync/
Channel anarcat
# AKA Far, convert when all clients are 1.4+
Master :anarcat-remote:
# AKA Near
Slave :anarcat-local:
# Exclude everything under the internal [Gmail] folder, except the interesting folders
#Patterns * ![Gmail]* "[Gmail]/Sent Mail" "[Gmail]/Starred" "[Gmail]/All Mail"
# Or include everything
Patterns *
# Automatically create missing mailboxes, both locally and on the server
#Create Both
Create slave
# Sync the movement of messages between folders and deletions, add after making sure the sync works
#Expunge Both

Long gone are the days where I would spend a long time reading a manual page to figure out the meaning of every option. If that's your thing, you might like this one. But I'm more of a "EXAMPLES section" kind of person now, and I somehow couldn't find a sample file on the website. I started from the Arch wiki one but it's actually not great because it's made for Gmail (which is not a usual Dovecot server). So a sample config file in the manpage would be a great addition. Thankfully, the Debian packages ships one in /usr/share/doc/isync/examples/mbsyncrc.sample but I only found that after I wrote my configuration. It was still useful and I recommend people take a look if they want to understand the syntax. Also, that syntax is a little overly complicated. For example, Far needs colons, like:

Far :anarcat-remote:

Why? That seems just too complicated. I also found that sections are not clearly identified: IMAPAccount and Channel mark section beginnings, for example, which is not at all obvious until you learn about mbsync's internals. There are also weird ordering issues: the SyncState option needs to be before IMAPAccount, presumably because it's global. Using a more standard format like .INI or TOML could improve that situation.

Stellar performance A transfer of the entire mail spool takes 56 minutes and 6 seconds, which is impressive. It's not quite "line rate": the resulting mail spool was 12GB (which is a problem, see below), which turns out to be about 29Mbit/s and therefore not maxing the gigabit link, and an order of magnitude slower than rsync. The incremental runs are roughly 2 seconds, which is even more impressive, as that's actually faster than rsync:

===> multitime results
1: mbsync -a
            Mean        Std.Dev.    Min         Median      Max
real        2.015       0.052       1.930       2.029       2.105       
user        0.660       0.040       0.592       0.661       0.722       
sys         0.338       0.033       0.268       0.341       0.387    

Those tests were performed with isync 1.3.0-2.2 on Debian bullseye. Tests with a newer isync release originally failed because of a corrupted message that triggered bug 999804 (see below). Running 1.4.3 under valgrind works around the bug, but adds a 50% performance cost, the full sync running in 1h35m. Once the upstream patch is applied, performance with 1.4.3 is fairly similar, considering that the new sync included the register folder with 4000 messages:

120.74user 213.19system 59:47.69elapsed 9%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 105420maxresident)k
29128inputs+28284376outputs (0major+45711minor)pagefaults 0swaps

That is ~13GB in ~60 minutes, which gives us 28.3Mbps. Incrementals are also pretty similar to 1.3.x, again considering the double-connect cost:

===> multitime results
1: mbsync -a
            Mean        Std.Dev.    Min         Median      Max
real        2.500       0.087       2.340       2.491       2.629       
user        0.718       0.037       0.679       0.711       0.793       
sys         0.322       0.024       0.284       0.320       0.365

Those tests were all done on a Gigabit link, but what happens on a slower link? My server uplink is slow: 25 Mbps down, 6 Mbps up. There mbsync is worse than the SMD baseline:

===> multitime results
1: mbsync -a
Mean        Std.Dev.    Min         Median      Max
real        31.531      0.724       30.764      31.271      33.100      
user        1.858       0.125       1.721       1.818       2.131       
sys         0.610       0.063       0.506       0.600       0.695       

That's 30 seconds for a sync, which is an order of magnitude slower than SMD.

Great user interface Compared to OfflineIMAP and (ahem) SMD, the mbsync UI is kind of neat:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ mbsync -a
Notice: Master/Slave are deprecated; use Far/Near instead.
C: 1/2  B: 204/205  F: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0  N: +1/200 *0/0 #0/0

(Note that nice switch away from slavery-related terms too.) The display is minimal, and yet informative. It's not obvious what does mean at first glance, but the manpage is useful at least for clarifying that:

This represents the cumulative progress over channels, boxes, and messages affected on the far and near side, respectively. The message counts represent added messages, messages with updated flags, and trashed messages, respectively. No attempt is made to calculate the totals in advance, so they grow over time as more information is gathered. (Emphasis mine).

In other words:

• C 2/2: channels done/total (2 done out of 2)
• B 204/205: mailboxes done/total (204 out of 205)
• F: changes on the far side
• N: +10/200 *0/0 #0/0: changes on the "near" side:
  • +10/200: 10 out of 200 messages downloaded
  • *0/0: no flag changed
  • #0/0: no message deleted

You get used to it, in a good way. It does not, unfortunately, show up when you run it in systemd, which is a bit annoying as I like to see a summary mail traffic in the logs.

Interoperability issue In my notmuch setup, I have bound key S to "mark spam", which basically assigns the tag spam to the message and removes a bunch of others. Then I have a notmuch-purge script which moves that message to the spam folder, for training purposes. It basically does this:

notmuch search --output=files --format=text0 "$search_spam" \
      xargs -r -0 mv -t "$HOME/Maildir/$ PREFIX junk/cur/"

This method, which worked fine in SMD (and also OfflineIMAP) created this error on sync:

Maildir error: duplicate UID 37578.

And indeed, there are now two messages with that UID in the mailbox:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir/.junk/ -name '*U=37578*'
Maildir/.junk/cur/1637427889.134334_2.angela,U=37578:2,S
Maildir/.junk/cur/1637348602.2492889_221804.angela,U=37578:2,S

This is actually a known limitation or, as mbsync(1) calls it, a "RECOMMENDATION":

When using the more efficient default UID mapping scheme, it is important that the MUA renames files when moving them between Maildir fold ers. Mutt always does that, while mu4e needs to be configured to do it:

(setq mu4e-change-filenames-when-moving t)

So it seems I would need to fix my script. It's unclear how the paths should be renamed, which is unfortunate, because I would need to change my script to adapt to mbsync, but I can't tell how just from reading the above. (A manual fix is actually to rename the file to remove the U= field: mbsync will generate a new one and then sync correctly.) Fortunately, someone else already fixed that issue: afew, a notmuch tagging script (much puns, such hurt), has a move mode that can rename files correctly, specifically designed to deal with mbsync. I had already been told about afew, but it's one more reason to standardize my notmuch hooks on that project, it looks like. Update: I have tried to use afew and found it has significant performance issues. It also has a completely different paradigm to what I am used to: it assumes all incoming mail has a new and lays its own tags on top of that (inbox, sent, etc). It can only move files from one folder at a time (see this bug) which breaks my spam training workflow. In general, I sync my tags into folders (e.g. ham, spam, sent) and message flags (e.g. inbox is F, unread is "not S", etc), and afew is not well suited for this (although there are hacks that try to fix this). I have worked hard to make my tagging scripts idempotent, and it's something afew doesn't currently have. Still, it would be better to have that code in Python than bash, so maybe I should consider my options here.

Stability issues The newer release in Debian bookworm (currently at 1.4.3) has stability issues on full sync. I filed bug 999804 in Debian about this, which lead to a thread on the upstream mailing list. I have found at least three distinct crashes that could be double-free bugs "which might be exploitable in the worst case", not a reassuring prospect. The thing is: mbsync is really fast, but the downside of that is that it's written in C, and with that comes a whole set of security issues. The Debian security tracker has only three CVEs on isync, but the above issues show there could be many more. Reading the source code certainly did not make me very comfortable with trusting it with untrusted data. I considered sandboxing it with systemd (below) but having systemd run as a --user process makes that difficult. I also considered using an apparmor profile but that is not trivial because we need to allow SSH and only some parts of it... Thankfully, upstream has been diligent at addressing the issues I have found. They provided a patch within a few days which did fix the sync issues. Update: upstream actually took the issue very seriously. They not only got CVE-2021-44143 assigned for my bug report, they also audited the code and found several more issues collectively identified as CVE-2021-3657, which actually also affect 1.3 (ie. Debian 11/bullseye/stable). Somehow my corpus doesn't trigger that issue, but it was still considered serious enough to warrant a CVE. So one the one hand: excellent response from upstream; but on the other hand: how many more of those could there be in there?

Automation with systemd The Arch wiki has instructions on how to setup mbsync as a systemd service. It suggests using the --verbose (-V) flag which is a little intense here, as it outputs 1444 lines of messages. I have used the following .service file:

[Unit]
Description=Mailbox synchronization service
ConditionHost=!marcos
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
Before=notmuch-new.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mbsync -a
Nice=10
IOSchedulingClass=idle
NoNewPrivileges=true
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

And the following .timer:

[Unit]
Description=Mailbox synchronization timer
ConditionHost=!marcos
[Timer]
OnBootSec=2m
OnUnitActiveSec=5m
Unit=mbsync.service
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

Note that we trigger notmuch through systemd, with the Before and also by adding mbsync.service to the notmuch-new.service file:

[Unit]
Description=notmuch new
After=mbsync.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot
Nice=10
ExecStart=/usr/bin/notmuch new
[Install]
WantedBy=mbsync.service

An improvement over polling repeatedly with a .timer would be to wake up only on IMAP notify, but neither imapnotify nor goimapnotify seem to be packaged in Debian. It would also not cover for the "sent folder" use case, where we need to wake up on local changes.

Password-less setup The sample file suggests this should work:

IMAPStore remote
Tunnel "ssh -q host.remote.com /usr/sbin/imapd"

Add BatchMode, restrict to IdentitiesOnly, provide a password-less key just for this, add compression (-C), find the Dovecot imap binary, and you get this:

IMAPAccount anarcat-tunnel
Tunnel "ssh -o BatchMode=yes -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_mbsync -o HostKeyAlias=shell.anarc.at -C anarcat@imap.anarc.at /usr/lib/dovecot/imap"

And it actually seems to work:

$ mbsync -a
Notice: Master/Slave are deprecated; use Far/Near instead.
C: 0/2  B: 0/1  F: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0  N: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0imap(anarcat): Error: net_connect_unix(/run/dovecot/stats-writer) failed: Permission denied
C: 2/2  B: 205/205  F: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0  N: +1/1 *3/3 #0/0imap(anarcat)<1611280><90uUOuyElmEQlhgAFjQyWQ>: Info: Logged out in=10808 out=15396642 deleted=0 expunged=0 trashed=0 hdr_count=0 hdr_bytes=0 body_count=1 body_bytes=8087

It's a bit noisy, however. dovecot/imap doesn't have a "usage" to speak of, but even the source code doesn't hint at a way to disable that Error message, so that's unfortunate. That socket is owned by root:dovecot so presumably Dovecot runs the imap process as $user:dovecot, which we can't do here. Oh well? Interestingly, the SSH setup is not faster than IMAP. With IMAP:

===> multitime results
1: mbsync -a
            Mean        Std.Dev.    Min         Median      Max
real        2.367       0.065       2.220       2.376       2.458       
user        0.793       0.047       0.731       0.776       0.871       
sys         0.426       0.040       0.364       0.434       0.476

With SSH:

===> multitime results
1: mbsync -a
            Mean        Std.Dev.    Min         Median      Max
real        2.515       0.088       2.274       2.532       2.594       
user        0.753       0.043       0.645       0.766       0.804       
sys         0.328       0.045       0.212       0.340       0.393

Basically: 200ms slower. Tolerable.

Migrating from SMD The above was how I migrated to mbsync on my first workstation. The work on the second one was more streamlined, especially since the corruption on mailboxes was fixed:

1. install isync, with the patch:

   dpkg -i isync_1.4.3-1.1~_amd64.deb
   

2. copy all files over from previous workstation to avoid a full resync (optional):

   rsync -a --info=progress2 angela:Maildir/ Maildir-mbsync/
   

3. rename all files to match new hostname (optional):

   find Maildir-mbsync/ -type f -name '*.angela,*' -print0    rename -0 's/\.angela,/\.curie,/'
   

4. trash the notmuch database (optional):

   rm -rf Maildir-mbsync/.notmuch/xapian/
   

5. disable all smd and notmuch services:

   systemctl --user --now disable smd-pull.service smd-pull.timer smd-push.service smd-push.timer notmuch-new.service notmuch-new.timer
   

6. do one last sync with smd:

   smd-pull --show-tags ; smd-push --show-tags ; notmuch new ; notmuch-sync-flagged -v
   

7. backup notmuch on the client and server:

   notmuch dump   pv > notmuch.dump
   

8. backup the maildir on the client and server:

   cp -al Maildir Maildir-bak
   

9. create the SSH key:

   ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f .ssh/id_ed25519_mbsync
   cat .ssh/id_ed25519_mbsync.pub
   

10. add to .ssh/authorized_keys on the server, like this: command="/usr/lib/dovecot/imap",restrict ssh-ed25519 AAAAC...
11. move old files aside, if present:

    mv Maildir Maildir-smd
    

12. move new files in place (CRITICAL SECTION BEGINS!):

    mv Maildir-mbsync Maildir
    

13. run a test sync, only pulling changes: mbsync --create-near --remove-none --expunge-none --noop anarcat-register
14. if that works well, try with all mailboxes: mbsync --create-near --remove-none --expunge-none --noop -a
15. if that works well, try again with a full sync: mbsync register mbsync -a
16. reindex and restore the notmuch database, this should take ~25 minutes:

    notmuch new
    pv notmuch.dump   notmuch restore
    

17. enable the systemd services and retire the smd-* services: systemctl --user enable mbsync.timer notmuch-new.service systemctl --user start mbsync.timer rm ~/.config/systemd/user/smd* systemctl daemon-reload

During the migration, notmuch helpfully told me the full list of those lost messages:

[...]
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: CAN6gO7_QgCaiDFvpG3AXHi6fW12qaN286+2a7ERQ2CQtzjSEPw@mail.gmail.com
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: CAPTU9Wmp0yAmaxO+qo8CegzRQZhCP853TWQ_Ne-YF94MDUZ+Dw@mail.gmail.com
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: F5086003-2917-4659-B7D2-66C62FCD4128@gmail.com
[...]
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: mailman.2.1316793601.53477.sage-members@mailman.sage.org
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: mailman.7.1317646801.26891.outages-discussion@outages.org
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: notmuch-sha1-000458df6e48d4857187a000d643ac971deeef47
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: notmuch-sha1-0079d8e0c3340e6f88c66f4c49fca758ea71d06d
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: notmuch-sha1-0194baa4cfb6d39bc9e4d8c049adaccaa777467d
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: notmuch-sha1-02aede494fc3f9e9f060cfd7c044d6d724ad287c
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: notmuch-sha1-06606c625d3b3445420e737afd9a245ae66e5562
Warning: cannot apply tags to missing message: notmuch-sha1-0747b020f7551415b9bf5059c58e0a637ba53b13
[...]

As detailed in the crash report, all of those were actually innocuous and could be ignored. Also note that we completely trash the notmuch database because it's actually faster to reindex from scratch than let notmuch slowly figure out that all mails are new and all the old mails are gone. The fresh indexing took:

nov 19 15:08:54 angela notmuch[2521117]: Processed 384679 total files in 23m 41s (270 files/sec.).
nov 19 15:08:54 angela notmuch[2521117]: Added 372610 new messages to the database.

While a reindexing on top of an existing database was going twice as slow, at about 120 files/sec.

Current config file Putting it all together, I ended up with the following configuration file:

SyncState *
Sync All
# IMAP side, AKA "Far"
IMAPAccount anarcat-imap
Host imap.anarc.at
User anarcat
PassCmd "pass imap.anarc.at"
SSLType IMAPS
CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
IMAPAccount anarcat-tunnel
Tunnel "ssh -o BatchMode=yes -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_mbsync -o HostKeyAlias=shell.anarc.at -C anarcat@imap.anarc.at /usr/lib/dovecot/imap"
IMAPStore anarcat-remote
Account anarcat-tunnel
# Maildir side, AKA "Near"
MaildirStore anarcat-local
# Maildir/top/sub/sub
#SubFolders Verbatim
# Maildir/.top.sub.sub
SubFolders Maildir++
# Maildir/top/.sub/.sub
# SubFolders legacy
# The trailing "/" is important
#Path ~/Maildir-mbsync/
Inbox ~/Maildir/
# what binds Maildir and IMAP
Channel anarcat
Far :anarcat-remote:
Near :anarcat-local:
# Exclude everything under the internal [Gmail] folder, except the interesting folders
#Patterns * ![Gmail]* "[Gmail]/Sent Mail" "[Gmail]/Starred" "[Gmail]/All Mail"
# Or include everything
#Patterns *
Patterns * !register  !.register
# Automatically create missing mailboxes, both locally and on the server
Create Both
#Create Near
# Sync the movement of messages between folders and deletions, add after making sure the sync works
Expunge Both
# Propagate mailbox deletion
Remove both
IMAPAccount anarcat-register-imap
Host imap.anarc.at
User register
PassCmd "pass imap.anarc.at-register"
SSLType IMAPS
CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
IMAPAccount anarcat-register-tunnel
Tunnel "ssh -o BatchMode=yes -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_mbsync -o HostKeyAlias=shell.anarc.at -C register@imap.anarc.at /usr/lib/dovecot/imap"
IMAPStore anarcat-register-remote
Account anarcat-register-tunnel
MaildirStore anarcat-register-local
SubFolders Maildir++
Inbox ~/Maildir/.register/
Channel anarcat-register
Far :anarcat-register-remote:
Near :anarcat-register-local:
Create Both
Expunge Both
Remove both

Note that it may be out of sync with my live (and private) configuration file, as I do not publish my "dotfiles" repository publicly for security reasons.

OfflineIMAP I've used OfflineIMAP for a long time before switching to SMD. I don't exactly remember why or when I started using it, but I do remember it became painfully slow as I started using notmuch, and would sometimes crash mysteriously. It's been a while, so my memory is hazy on that. It also kind of died in a fire when Python 2 stop being maintained. The main author moved on to a different project, imapfw which could serve as a framework to build IMAP clients, but never seemed to implement all of the OfflineIMAP features and certainly not configuration file compatibility. Thankfully, a new team of volunteers ported OfflineIMAP to Python 3 and we can now test that new version to see if it is an improvement over mbsync.

Crash on full sync The first thing that happened on a full sync is this crash:

Copy message from RemoteAnarcat:junk:
 ERROR: Copying message 30624 [acc: Anarcat]
  decoding with 'X-EUC-TW' codec failed (AttributeError: 'memoryview' object has no attribute 'decode')
Thread 'Copy message from RemoteAnarcat:junk' terminated with exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/imaputil.py", line 406, in utf7m_decode
    for c in binary.decode():
AttributeError: 'memoryview' object has no attribute 'decode'
The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/threadutil.py", line 146, in run
    Thread.run(self)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/threading.py", line 892, in run
    self._target(*self._args, **self._kwargs)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/Base.py", line 802, in copymessageto
    message = self.getmessage(uid)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/IMAP.py", line 342, in getmessage
    data = self._fetch_from_imap(str(uid), self.retrycount)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/IMAP.py", line 908, in _fetch_from_imap
    ndata1 = self.parser['8bit-RFC'].parsebytes(data[0][1])
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/parser.py", line 123, in parsebytes
    return self.parser.parsestr(text, headersonly)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/parser.py", line 67, in parsestr
    return self.parse(StringIO(text), headersonly=headersonly)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/parser.py", line 56, in parse
    feedparser.feed(data)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 176, in feed
    self._call_parse()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 180, in _call_parse
    self._parse()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 385, in _parsegen
    for retval in self._parsegen():
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 298, in _parsegen
    for retval in self._parsegen():
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 385, in _parsegen
    for retval in self._parsegen():
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 256, in _parsegen
    if self._cur.get_content_type() == 'message/delivery-status':
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/message.py", line 578, in get_content_type
    value = self.get('content-type', missing)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/message.py", line 471, in get
    return self.policy.header_fetch_parse(k, v)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/policy.py", line 163, in header_fetch_parse
    return self.header_factory(name, value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/headerregistry.py", line 601, in __call__
    return self[name](name, value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/headerregistry.py", line 196, in __new__
    cls.parse(value, kwds)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/headerregistry.py", line 445, in parse
    kwds['parse_tree'] = parse_tree = cls.value_parser(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 2675, in parse_content_type_header
    ctype.append(parse_mime_parameters(value[1:]))
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 2569, in parse_mime_parameters
    token, value = get_parameter(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 2492, in get_parameter
    token, value = get_value(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 2403, in get_value
    token, value = get_quoted_string(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 1294, in get_quoted_string
    token, value = get_bare_quoted_string(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 1223, in get_bare_quoted_string
    token, value = get_encoded_word(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 1064, in get_encoded_word
    text, charset, lang, defects = _ew.decode('=?' + tok + '?=')
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_encoded_words.py", line 181, in decode
    string = bstring.decode(charset)
AttributeError: decoding with 'X-EUC-TW' codec failed (AttributeError: 'memoryview' object has no attribute 'decode')
Last 1 debug messages logged for Copy message from RemoteAnarcat:junk prior to exception:
thread: Register new thread 'Copy message from RemoteAnarcat:junk' (account 'Anarcat')
ERROR: Exceptions occurred during the run!
ERROR: Copying message 30624 [acc: Anarcat]
  decoding with 'X-EUC-TW' codec failed (AttributeError: 'memoryview' object has no attribute 'decode')
Traceback:
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/Base.py", line 802, in copymessageto
    message = self.getmessage(uid)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/IMAP.py", line 342, in getmessage
    data = self._fetch_from_imap(str(uid), self.retrycount)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/IMAP.py", line 908, in _fetch_from_imap
    ndata1 = self.parser['8bit-RFC'].parsebytes(data[0][1])
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/parser.py", line 123, in parsebytes
    return self.parser.parsestr(text, headersonly)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/parser.py", line 67, in parsestr
    return self.parse(StringIO(text), headersonly=headersonly)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/parser.py", line 56, in parse
    feedparser.feed(data)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 176, in feed
    self._call_parse()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 180, in _call_parse
    self._parse()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 385, in _parsegen
    for retval in self._parsegen():
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 298, in _parsegen
    for retval in self._parsegen():
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 385, in _parsegen
    for retval in self._parsegen():
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/feedparser.py", line 256, in _parsegen
    if self._cur.get_content_type() == 'message/delivery-status':
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/message.py", line 578, in get_content_type
    value = self.get('content-type', missing)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/message.py", line 471, in get
    return self.policy.header_fetch_parse(k, v)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/policy.py", line 163, in header_fetch_parse
    return self.header_factory(name, value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/headerregistry.py", line 601, in __call__
    return self[name](name, value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/headerregistry.py", line 196, in __new__
    cls.parse(value, kwds)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/headerregistry.py", line 445, in parse
    kwds['parse_tree'] = parse_tree = cls.value_parser(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 2675, in parse_content_type_header
    ctype.append(parse_mime_parameters(value[1:]))
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 2569, in parse_mime_parameters
    token, value = get_parameter(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 2492, in get_parameter
    token, value = get_value(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 2403, in get_value
    token, value = get_quoted_string(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 1294, in get_quoted_string
    token, value = get_bare_quoted_string(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 1223, in get_bare_quoted_string
    token, value = get_encoded_word(value)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_header_value_parser.py", line 1064, in get_encoded_word
    text, charset, lang, defects = _ew.decode('=?' + tok + '?=')
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/email/_encoded_words.py", line 181, in decode
    string = bstring.decode(charset)
Folder junk [acc: Anarcat]:
 Copy message UID 30626 (29008/49310) RemoteAnarcat:junk -> LocalAnarcat:junk
Command exited with non-zero status 100
5252.91user 535.86system 3:21:00elapsed 47%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 846304maxresident)k
96344inputs+26563792outputs (1189major+2155815minor)pagefaults 0swaps

That only transferred about 8GB of mail, which gives us a transfer rate of 5.3Mbit/s, more than 5 times slower than mbsync. This bug is possibly limited to the bullseye version of offlineimap3 (the lovely 0.0~git20210225.1e7ef9e+dfsg-4), while the current sid version (the equally gorgeous 0.0~git20211018.e64c254+dfsg-1) seems unaffected.

Tolerable performance The new release still crashes, except it does so at the very end, which is an improvement, since the mails do get transferred:

 *** Finished account 'Anarcat' in 511:12
ERROR: Exceptions occurred during the run!
ERROR: Exception parsing message with ID (<20190619152034.BFB8810E07A@marcos.anarc.at>) from imaplib (response type: bytes).
 AttributeError: decoding with 'X-EUC-TW' codec failed (AttributeError: 'memoryview' object has no attribute 'decode')
Traceback:
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/Base.py", line 810, in copymessageto
    message = self.getmessage(uid)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/IMAP.py", line 343, in getmessage
    data = self._fetch_from_imap(str(uid), self.retrycount)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/IMAP.py", line 910, in _fetch_from_imap
    raise OfflineImapError(
ERROR: Exception parsing message with ID (<40A270DB.9090609@alternatives.ca>) from imaplib (response type: bytes).
 AttributeError: decoding with 'x-mac-roman' codec failed (AttributeError: 'memoryview' object has no attribute 'decode')
Traceback:
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/Base.py", line 810, in copymessageto
    message = self.getmessage(uid)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/IMAP.py", line 343, in getmessage
    data = self._fetch_from_imap(str(uid), self.retrycount)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/IMAP.py", line 910, in _fetch_from_imap
    raise OfflineImapError(
ERROR: IMAP server 'RemoteAnarcat' does not have a message with UID '32686'
Traceback:
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/Base.py", line 810, in copymessageto
    message = self.getmessage(uid)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/IMAP.py", line 343, in getmessage
    data = self._fetch_from_imap(str(uid), self.retrycount)
  File "/usr/share/offlineimap3/offlineimap/folder/IMAP.py", line 889, in _fetch_from_imap
    raise OfflineImapError(reason, severity)
Command exited with non-zero status 1
8273.52user 983.80system 8:31:12elapsed 30%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 841936maxresident)k
56376inputs+43247608outputs (811major+4972914minor)pagefaults 0swaps
"offlineimap  -o " took 8 hours 31 mins 15 secs

This is 8h31m for transferring 12G, which is around 3.1Mbit/s. That is nine times slower than mbsync, almost an order of magnitude! Now that we have a full sync, we can test incremental synchronization. That is also much slower:

===> multitime results
1: sh -c "offlineimap -o   true"
            Mean        Std.Dev.    Min         Median      Max
real        24.639      0.513       23.946      24.526      25.708      
user        23.912      0.473       23.404      23.795      24.947      
sys         1.743       0.105       1.607       1.729       2.002

That is also an order of magnitude slower than mbsync, and significantly slower than what you'd expect from a sync process. ~30 seconds is long enough to make me impatient and distracted; 3 seconds, less so: I can wait and see the results almost immediately.

Integrity check That said: this is still on a gigabit link. It's technically possible that OfflineIMAP performs better than mbsync over a slow link, but I Haven't tested that theory. The OfflineIMAP mail spool is missing quite a few messages as well:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir-offlineimap -type f -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
381463
anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir -type f -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
385247

... although that's probably all either new messages or the register folder, so OfflineIMAP might actually be in a better position there. But digging in more, it seems like the actual per-folder diff is fairly similar to mbsync: a few messages missing here and there. Considering OfflineIMAP's instability and poor performance, I have not looked any deeper in those discrepancies.

Other projects to evaluate Those are all the options I have considered, in alphabetical order

• doveadm-sync: requires dovecot on both ends, can tunnel over SSH, may have performance issues in incremental sync, written in C
• fdm: fetchmail replacement, IMAP/POP3/stdin/Maildir/mbox,NNTP support, SOCKS support (for Tor), complex rules for delivering to specific mailboxes, adding headers, piping to commands, etc. discarded because no (real) support for keeping mail on the server, and written in C
• getmail: fetchmail replacement, IMAP/POP3 support, supports incremental runs, classification rules, Python
• interimap: syncs two IMAP servers, apparently faster than doveadm and offlineimap, but requires running an IMAP server locally, Perl
• isync/mbsync: TLS client certs and SSH tunnels, fast, incremental, IMAP/POP/Maildir support, multiple mailbox, trash and recursion support, and generally has good words from multiple Debian and notmuch people (Arch tutorial), written in C, review above
• mail-sync: notify support, happens over any piped transport (e.g. ssh), diff/patch system, requires binary on both ends, mentions UUCP in the manpage, mentions rsmtp which is a nice name for rsendmail. not evaluated because it seems awfully complex to setup, Haskell
• nncp: treat the local spool as another mail server, not really compatible with my "multiple clients" setup, Golang
• offlineimap3: requires IMAP, used the py2 version in the past, might just still work, first sync painful (IIRC), ways to tunnel over SSH, review above, Python

Most projects were not evaluated due to lack of time.

Conclusion I'm now using mbsync to sync my mail. I'm a little disappointed by the synchronisation times over the slow link, but I guess that's on par for the course if we use IMAP. We are bound by the network speed much more than with custom protocols. I'm also worried about the C implementation and the crashes I have witnessed, but I am encouraged by the fast upstream response. Time will tell if I will stick with that setup. I'm certainly curious about the promises of interimap and mail-sync, but I have ran out of time on this project.

gusnan@debian-i7:~ > dpkg --compare-versions 1.0b lt 1.0 && echo true
gusnan@debian-i7:~ > dpkg --compare-versions 1.0b gt 1.0 && echo true
true

uversionmangle=s/(\d)[\_\.\-\+]?((RC rc pre dev beta alpha b a)\d*)$/$1~$2/;s/\~b/\~beta/;,\

Comments on the BBI court case which happened in Kenya, then and the subsequent appeal. I am not going to share much about the coverage of the BBI appeal as Gautam Bhatia has shared quite eloquently his observations, both on the initial case and the subsequent appeal which lasted 5 days in Kenya and was shown all around the world thanks to YouTube. One of the interesting points which stuck with me was that in Kenya, sign language is one of the official languages. And in fact, I was able to read quite a bit about the various sign languages which are there in Kenya. It just boggles the mind that there are countries that also give importance to such even though they are not as rich or as developed as we call developed economies. I probably might give more space and give more depth as it does carry some important judicial jurisprudence which is and which will be felt around the world. How does India react or doesn t is probably another matter altogether But yes, it needs it own space, maybe after some more time. Report on Standing Committee on IP Regulation in India and the false promises. Again, I do not want to take much time in sharing details about what the report contains, as the report can be found here. I have uploaded it on WordPress, in case of an issue. An observation on the same subject can be found here. At least, to me and probably those who have been following the IP space as either using/working on free software or even IP would be aware that the issues shared have been known since 1994. And it does benefit the industry rather than the country. This way, the rent-seekers, and monopolists win. There is ample literature that shared how rich countries had weak regulation for decades and even centuries till it was advantageous for them to have strong IP. One can look at the history of Europe and the United States for it. We can also look at the history of our neighbor China, which for the last 5 decades has used some provision of IP and disregarded many others. But these words are of no use, as the policies done and shared are by the rich for the rich.

Fighting between two State Borders Ironically or because of it, two BJP ruled states Assam and Mizoram fought between themselves. In which 6 policemen died. While the history of the two states is complicated it becomes a bit more complicated when one goes back into Assam and ULFA history and comes to know that ULFA could not have become that powerful until and unless, the Marwaris, people of my clan had not given generous donations to them. They thought it was a good investment, which later would turn out to be untrue. Those who think ULFA has declined, or whatever, still don t have answers to this or this. Interestingly, both the Chief Ministers approached the Home Minister (Mr. Amit Shah) of BJP. Mr. Shah was supposed to be the Chanakya but in many instances, including this one, he decided to stay away. His statement was on the lines of you guys figure it out yourself. There is a poem that was shared by the late poet Rahat Indori. I am sharing the same below as an image and will attempt to put a rough translation.

kisi ke baap ka hindustan todi hain Rahat Indori

Poets, whether in India or elsewhere, are known to speak truth to power and are a bit of a rebel. This poem by Rahat Indori is provocatively titled Kisi ke baap ka Hindustan todi hai , It challenges the majoritarian idea that Hindustan/India only belongs to the majoritarian religion. He also challenges as well as asserts at the same time that every Indian citizen, regardless of whatever his or her religion might be, is an Indian and can assert India as his home. While the whole poem is compelling in itself, for me what hits home is in the second stanza

:Lagegi Aag to aayege ghat kayi zad me, Yaha pe sirf hamara makan todi hai The meaning is simple yet subtle, he uses Aag or Fire as a symbol of hate sharing that if hate spreads, it won t be his home alone that will be torched. If one wants to literally understand what he meant, I present to you the cult Russian movie No Escapes or Ogon as it is known in Russian. If one were to decipher why the Russian film doesn t talk about climate change, one has to view it from the prism of what their leader Vladimir Putin has said and done over the years. As can be seen even in there, the situation is far more complex than one imagines. Although, it is interesting to note that he decried Climate change as man-made till as late as last year and was on the side of Trump throughout his presidency. This was in 2017 as well as perhaps this. Interestingly, there was a change in tenor and note just a couple of weeks back, but that could be only politicking or much more. Statements that are not backed by legislation and application are usually just a whitewash. We would have to wait to see what concrete steps are taken by Putin, Kremlin, and their Duma before saying either way.

Civil Aviation and the broad structure Civil Aviation is a large topic and I would not be able to do justice to it all in one article/blog post. So, for e.g. I will not be getting into Aircraft (Boeing, Airbus, Comac etc., etc.) or the new electric aircraft as that will just make the blog post long. I will not be also talking about cargo or Visa or many such topics, as all of them actually would and do need their own space. So this would be much more limited to Airports and to some extent airlines, as one cannot survive without the other. The primary reason for doing this is there is and has been a lot of myth-making in India about Civil Aviation in general, whether it has to do with Civil Aviation history or whatever passes as of policy in India.

A little early history Man has always looked at the stars and envisaged himself or herself as a bird, flying with gay abandon. In fact, there have been many paintings, sculptors who imagined how we would fly. The Steam Engine itself was invented in 82 BCE. But the attempt to fly was done by a certain Monk called Brother Elmer of Malmesbury who attempted the same in 1010., shortly after the birth of the rudimentary steam engine The most famous of all would be Leonardo da Vinci for his amazing sketches of flying machines in 1493. There were a couple of books by Cyrano de Bergerac, apparently wrote two books, both sadly published after his death. Interestingly, you can find both the book and the gentleman in the Project Gutenberg archives. How much of M/s Cyrano s exploits were his own and how much embellished by M/S Curtis, maybe a friend, a lover who knows, but it does give the air of the swashbuckling adventurer of the time which many men aspired to in that time. So, why not an author???

L Autre Monde: ou les tats et Empires de la Lune (Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon) and Les tats et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun). These two French books apparently had a lot of references to flying machines. Both of them were authored by Cyrano de Bergerac. Both of these were sadly published after his death, one apparently in 1656 and the other one a couple of years later. By the 17th century, while it had become easy to know and measure the latitude, measuring longitude was a problem. In fact, it can be argued and probably successfully that India wouldn t have been under British rule or UK wouldn t have been a naval superpower if it hadn t solved the longitudinal problem. Over the years, the British Royal Navy suffered many blows, one of the most famous or infamous among them might be the Scilly naval disaster of 1707 which led to the death of 2000 odd British Royal naval personnel and led to Queen Anne, who was ruling over England at that time via Parliament and called it the Longitude Act which basically was an open competition for anybody to fix the problem and carried the prize money of 20,000. While nobody could claim the whole prize, many did get smaller amounts depending upon the achievements. The best and the nearest who came was John Harrison who made the first sea-watch and with modifications, over the years it became miniaturized to a pocket-sized Marine chronometer although, I doubt the ones used today look anything in those days. But if that had not been invented, we surely would have been freed long ago. The assumption being that the East India Company would have dashed onto rocks so many times, that the whole exercise would have been futile. The downside of it is that maritime trade routes that are being used today and the commerce would not have been. Neither would have aircraft or space for that matter, or at the very least delayed by how many years or decades, nobody knows. If one wants to read about the Longitudinal problem, one can get the famous book Longitude .

In many mythologies, including Indian and Arabian tales, in which we had the flying carpet which would let its passengers go from one place to the next. Then there is also mention of Pushpak Vimana in ancient texts, but those secrets remain secrets. Think how much foreign exchange India could make by both using it and exporting the same worldwide. And I m being serious. There are many who believe in it, but sadly, the ones who know the secret don t seem to want India s progress. Just think of the carbon credits that India could have, which itself would make India a superpower. And I m being serious.

Western Ideas and Implementation. Even in the late and early 18th century, there were many machines that were designed to have controlled flight, but it was only the Wright Flyer that was able to demonstrate a controlled flight in 1903. The ones who came pretty close to what the Wrights achieved were the people by the name of Cayley and Langley. They actually studied what the pioneers had done. They looked at what Otto Lilienthal had done, as he had done a lot of hang-gliding and put a lot of literature in the public domain then.

Furthermore, they also consulted Octave Chanute. The whole system and history of the same are a bit complicated, but it does give a window to what happened then. So, it won t be wrong to say that whatever the Wright Brothers accomplished would probably not have been possible or would have taken years or maybe even decades if that literature and experiments, drawings, etc. in the commons were not available. So, while they did experimentation, they also looked at what other people were doing and had done which was in public domain/commons.

They also did a lot of testing, which gave them new insights. Even the propulsion system they used in the 1903 flight was a design by Nicolaus Otto. In fact, the Aircraft would not have been born if the Chinese had not invented kites in the early sixth century A.D. One also has to credit Issac Newton because of the three laws of motion, again without which none of the above could have happened. What is credited to the Wilbur brothers is not just they made the Kitty Hawk, they also made it commercial as they sold it and variations of the design to the American Air Force and also made a pilot school where pilots were trained for warfighting. 119 odd pilots came out of that school. The Wrights thought that air supremacy would end the war early, but this turned out to be a false hope.

Competition and Those Magnificent Men and their flying machines One of the first competitions to unlock creativity was the English Channel crossing offer made by Daily Mail. This was successfully done by the Frenchman Louis Bl riot. You can read his account here. There were quite a few competitions before World War 1 broke out. There is a beautiful, humorous movie that does dedicate itself to imagining how things would have gone in that time. In fact, there have been two movies, this one and an earlier movie called Sky Riders made many a youth dream. The other movie sadly is not yet in the public domain, and when it will be nobody knows, but if you see it or even read it, it gives you goosebumps.

World War 1 and Improvements to Aircraft World War 1 is remembered as the Great War or the War to end all wars in an attempt at irony. It did a lot of destruction of both people and property, and in fact, laid the foundation of World War 2. At the same time, if World War 1 hadn t happened then Airpower, Plane technology would have taken decades. Even medicine and medical techniques became revolutionary due to World War 1. In order to be brief, I am not sharing much about World War 1 otherwise that itself would become its own blog post. And while it had its heroes and villains who, when, why could be tackled perhaps another time.

The Guggenheim Family and the birth of Civil Aviation If one has to credit one family for the birth of the Civil Aviation, it has to be the Guggenheim family. Again, I would not like to dwell much as much of their contribution has already been noted here. There are quite a few things still that need to be said and pointed out. First and foremost is the fact that they made lessons about flying from grade school to college and afterward till college and beyond which were in the syllabus, whereas in the Indian schooling system, there is nothing like that to date. Here, in India, even in Engineering courses, you don t have much info. Unless until you go for professional Aviation or Aeronautical courses and most of these courses cost a bomb so either the very rich or the very determined (with loans) only go for that, at least that s what my friends have shared. And there is no guarantee you will get a job after that, especially in today s climate. Even their fund, grants, and prizes which were given to people for various people so that improvements could be made to the United States Civil Aviation. This, as shared in the report/blog post shared, was in response to what the younger child/brother saw as Europe having a large advantage both in Military and Civil Aviation. They also made several grants in several Universities which would not only do notable work during their lifetime but carry on the legacy researching on different aspects of Aircraft. One point that should be noted is that Europe was far ahead even then of the U.S. which prompted the younger son. There had already been talks of civil/civilian flights on European routes, although much different from what either of us can imagine today. Even with everything that the U.S. had going for her and still has, Europe is the one which has better airports, better facilities, better everything than the U.S. has even today. If you look at the lists of the Airports for better value of money or facilities, you would find many Airports from Europe, some from Asia, and only a few from the U.S. even though they are some of the most frequent users of the service. But that debate and arguments I would have to leave for perhaps the next blog post as there is still a lot to be covered between the 1930s, 1950s, and today. The Guggenheims archives does a fantastic job of sharing part of the story till the 1950s, but there is also quite a bit which it doesn t. I will probably start from that in the next blog post and then carry on ahead. Lastly, before I wind up, I have to share why I felt the need to write, capture and share this part of Aviation history. The plain and simple reason being, many of the people I meet either on the web, on Twitter or even in real life, many of them are just unaware of how this whole thing came about. The unawareness in my fellow brothers and sisters is just shocking, overwhelming. At least, by sharing these articles, I at least would be able to guide them or at least let them know how it all came to be and where things are going and not just be so clueless. Till later.

BBI Kenya and live Supreme Court streaming on YT The last few weeks have been unrelenting as all sorts of news have been coming in, mostly about the downturn in the Economy, Islamophobia in India on the rise, Covid, and electioneering. However, in the last few days, Kenya surpassed India in live-streaming proceeds in a Court of Appeals about BBI or Building Bridges Initiative. A background filler article on the topic can be found in BBC. The live-streaming was done via YT and if wants to they can start from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIQzpmVKvro One can also subscribe to K24TV which took the initiative of sharing the proceedings with people worldwide. If K24TV continues to share SC proceedings of Kenya, that would add to the soft power of Kenya. I will not go into the details of the case as Gautam Bhatia who has been following the goings-on in Kenya is a far better authority on the subject. In fact, just recently he shared about another Kenyan judgment from a trial which can be seen here. He has shared the proceedings and some hot takes on the Twitter thread started by him. Probably after a couple of weeks or more when he has processed what all has happened there, he may also share some nuances although many of his thoughts would probably go to his book on Comparative Constitutional Law which he hopes to publish maybe in 2021/2022 or whenever he can. Such televised proceedings are sure to alleviate the standing of Kenya internationally. There has been a proposal to do similar broadcasts by India but with surveillance built-in, so they know who is watching. The problems with the architecture and the surveillance built-in have been shared by Srinivas Kodali or DigitalDutta quite a few times, but that probably is a story for another day.

Uttar Pradesh Population Control Bill

Hindus comprise 83% of Indian couples with more than two child children

The U.P. Population Bill came and it came with lot of prejudices. One of the prejudices is the idea that Muslims create or procreate to have the most children. Even with data is presented as shared above from NFHS National Family Health Survey which is supposed to carry our surveys every few years did the last one around 4 years back. The analysis from it has been instrumental not only in preparing graphs as above but also sharing about what sort of death toll must have been in rural India. And as somebody who have had the opportunity in the past, can vouch that you need to be extremely lucky if something happens to you when you are in a rural area. Even in places like Bodh Gaya (have been there) where millions of tourists come as it is one of the places not to be missed on the Buddhism tourist circuit, the medical facilities are pretty underwhelming. I am not citing it simply because there are too many such newspaper reports from even before the pandemic, and both the State and the Central Govt. response has been dismal. Just a few months back, they were recalled. There were reports of votes being bought at INR 1000/- (around $14) and a bottle or two of liquor. There used to be a time when election monitoring whether national or state used to be a thing, and you had LTO s (Long-time Observers) and STO s (Short-Term Observers) to make sure that the election has been neutral. This has been on the decline in this regime, but that probably is for another time altogether. Although, have to point out the article which I had shared a few months ago on the private healthcare model is flawed especially for rural areas. Instead of going for cheap, telemedicine centers that run some version of a Linux distro. And can provide a variety of services, I know Kerala and Tamil Nadu from South India have experimented in past but such engagements need to be scaled up. This probably will come to know when the next time I visit those places (sadly due to the virus, not anytime soonish.:( ) . Going back to the original topic, though, I had shared Hans Rosling s famous Ted talk on population growth which shows that even countries which we would not normally associate with family planning for e.g. the middle-east and Africa have also been falling quite rapidly. Of course, when people have deeply held prejudices, then it is difficult. Even when sharing China as to how they had to let go of their old policy in 2016 as they had the thing for leftover men . I also shared the powerful movie So Long my Son. I even shared how in Haryana women were and are trafficked and have been an issue for centuries but as neither suits the RW propaganda, they simply refuse to engage. They are more repulsed by people who publish this news rather than those who are actually practicing it, as that is culture . There is also teenage pregnancy, female infanticide, sex-selective abortion, etc., etc. It is just all too horrible to contemplate. Personal anecdote I know a couple, or they used to be a couple, where the gentleman wanted to have a male child. It was only after they got an autistic child, they got their DNA tested and came to know that the gentleman had a genetic problem. He again forced and had another child, and that too turned out to be autistic. Finally, he left the wife and the children, divorced them and lived with another woman. Almost a decade of the wife s life was ruined. The wife before marriage was a gifted programmer employed at IBM. This was an arranged marriage. After this, if you are thinking of marrying, apart from doing astrology charts, also look up DNA compatibility charts. Far better than ruining yours or the women s life. Both the children whom I loved are now in heaven, god bless them If one wants to, one can read a bit more about the Uttar Pradesh Population bill here. The sad part is that the systems which need fixing, nobody wants to fix. The reason being simple. If you get good health service by public sector, who will go to the private sector. In Europe, AFAIK they have the best medical bang for the money. Even the U.S. looks at Europe and hopes it had the systems that Europe has but that again is probably for another day.

South Africa and India long-lost brothers. As had shared before, after the 2016 South African Debconf convention, I had been following South Africa. I was happy when FeesMustFall worked and in 2017 the then ANC president Zuma declared it in late 2017. I am sure that people who have been regular visitors to this blog know how my position is on student loans. They also must be knowing that even in U.S. till the 1970s it had free education all the way to be a lawyer and getting a lawyer license. It is only when people like Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and others from the civil rights movement came out as a major force that the capitalists started imposing fees. They wanted people who could be sold to corporate slavery, and they won. Just last week, Biden took some steps and canceled student loans and is working on steps towards broad debt forgiveness. Interestingly, NASA has an affirmative diversity program for people from diverse backgrounds, where a couple of UC (Upper Caste) women got the job. While they got the job, the RW (Right-Wing) was overjoyed as they got jobs on merit . Later, it was found that both the women were the third or fourth generation of immigrants in U.S.

NASA Federal Equal Opportunity Policy Directive NPD 3713 2H

Going back to the original question and topic, while there has been a concerning spate of violence, some calling it the worst sort of violence not witnessed since 1994. The problem, as ascertained in that article, is the same as here in India or elsewhere. Those, again, who have been on my blog know that merit 90% of the time is a function of privilege and there is a vast amount of academic literature which supports that. If, for a moment, you look at the data that is shared in the graph above which shows that 83% of Hindus and 13% of Muslims have more than 2 children, what does it show, it shows that 83+13 = 96% of the population is living in insecurity. The 5% are the ones who have actually consolidated more power during this regime rule in India. Similarly, from what I understood living in Cape Town for about a month, it is the Dutch Afrikaans as they like to call themselves and the immigrants who come from abroad who have enjoyed the fruits of tourism and money and power while the rest of the country is dying due to poverty. It is the same there, it is the same here. Corruption is also rampant in both countries, and the judiciary is virtually absent from both communities in India and SA. Interestingly, South Africa and India have been at loggerheads, but I suspect that is more due to the money and lobbying power by the Dutch. Usually, those who have money power, do get laws and even press on their side, and it is usually the ruling party in power. I cannot help but share about the Gupta brothers and their corruption as I came to know about it in 2016. And as have shared that I m related to Gupta s on my mother s side, not those specific ones but Gupta as a clan. The history of the Gupta dynasty does go back to the 3rd-4th century. Equally interesting have been Sonali Ranade s series of articles which she wrote in National Herald, the latest on exports which is actually the key to taking India out of poverty rather than anything else. While in other countries Exporters are given all sort of subsidies, here it is being worked as how to give them less. This was in Economic times hardly a week back

Export incentive schemes being reduced

I can t imagine the incredible stupidity done by the Finance Minister. And then in an attempt to prove that, they will attempt to present a rosy picture with numbers that have nothing to do with reality. Interestingly enough, India at one time was a major exporter of apples, especially from Kashmir. Now instead of exporting, we are importing them from Afghanistan as well as Belgium and now even from the UK. Those who might not want to use the Twitter link could use this article. Of course, what India got out of this trade deal is not known. One can see that the UK got the better deal from this. Instead of investing in our own capacity expansion, we are investing in increasing the capacity of others. This is at the time when due to fuel price hike (Central taxes 66%) demand is completely flat. And this is when our own CEA (Chief Economic Adviser) tells us that growth will be at the most 6-7% and that too in 2023-2024 while currently, the inflation rate is around 12%. Is it then any wonder that almost 70% are living on Govt. ration and people in the streets of Kolkata, Assam, and other places have to sell kidneys to make sure they have some money for their kids for tomorrow. Now I have nothing against the UK but trade negotiation is an art. Sadly, this has been going on for the last few years. The politicians in India fool the public by always telling of future trade deals. Sadly, as any businessman knows, once you have compromised, you always have to compromise. And the more you compromise, the more you weaken the hand for any future trade deals.

IIT pupil tries to sell kidney to repay loan, but no takers for Dalit organ.

The above was from yesterday s Times of India. Just goes to show how much people are suffering. There have been reports in vernacular papers of quite a few people from across regions and communities are doing this so they can live without pain a bit. Almost all the time, the politicians are saved as only few understand international trade, the diplomacy and the surrounding geopolitics around it. And this sadly, is as much to do with basic education as much as it is to any other factor

Suli Deals About a month back on the holy day of Ramzan or Ramadan as it is known in the west, which is beloved by Muslims, a couple of Muslim women were targeted and virtually auctioned. Soon, there was a flood and a GitHub repository was created where hundreds of Muslim women, especially those who have a voice and fearlessly talk about their understanding about issues and things, were being virtually auctioned. One week after the FIR was put up, to date none of the people mentioned in the FIR have been arrested. In fact, just yesterday, there was an open letter which was published by livelaw. I have saved a copy on WordPress just in case something does go wrong. Other than the disgust we feel, can t say much as no action being taken by GOI and police.

IT Rules 2021 and Big Media After almost a year of sleeping when most activists were screaming hoarsely about how the new IT rules are dangerous for one and all, big media finally woke up a few weeks back and listed a writ petition in Madras High Court of the same. Although to be frank, the real writ petition was filed In February 2021, classical singer, performer T.M. Krishna in Madras High Court. Again, a copy of the writ petition, I have hosted on WordPress. On 23rd June 2021, a group of 13 media outlets and a journalist have challenged the IT Rules, 2021. The Contention came from Digital News Publishers Association which is made up of the following news companies: ABP Network Private Limited, Amar Ujala Limited, DB Corp Limited, Express Network Pvt Ltd, HT Digital Streams Limited, IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd, Jagran Prakashan Limited, Lokmat Media Private Limited, NDTV Convergence Limited, TV Today Network Limited, The Malayala Manorama Co (P) Ltd, Times Internet Limited, and Ushodaya Enterprises Private Limited. All the above are heavyweights in the markets where they operate. The reason being simple, when these media organizations came into being, the idea was to have self-regulation, which by and large has worked. Now, the present Govt. wants each news item to be okayed by them before publication. This is nothing but blatant misuse of power and an attempt at censorship. In fact, the Tamil Nadu BJP president himself made a promise of the same. And of course, what is true and what is a lie, only GOI knows and will decide for the rest of the country. If somebody remembers Joseph Goebbels at this stage, it is merely a coincidence. Anyways, 3 days ago Supreme Court on 14th July the Honorable Supreme Court asked the Madras High Court to transfer all the petitions to SC. This, the Madras High Court denied as cited/shared by Meera Emmanuel, a reporter who works with barandbench. The Court says nothing doing, let this happen and then the SC can entertain the motion of doing it that level. At the same time, they would have the benefit of Madras High Court opinion as well. It gave the center two weeks to file a reply. So, either of end-week of July or latest by August first week, we might be able to read the Center s reply on the same. The SC could do a forceful intervention, but it would lead to similar outrage as has been witnessed in the past when a judge commented that if the SC has to do it all, then why do we need the High Courts, district courts etc. let all the solutions come from SC itself. This was, admittedly, frustration on the part of the judge, but due in part to the needless intervention of SC time and time again. But the concerns had been felt around all the different courts in the country.

Sedition Law A couple of days ago, the Supreme Court under the guidance of Honorable CJI NV Ramanna, entertained the PIL filed by Maj Gen S G Vombatkere (Retd.) which asked simply that the sedition law which was used in the colonial times by the British to quell dissent by Mahatma Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak during the Indian freedom struggle. A good background filler article can be found on MSN which tells about some recent cases but more importantly how historically the sedition law was used to quell dissent during India s Independence. Another article on MSN actually elaborates on the PIL filed by Maj Gen S. G. Vombatkere. Another article on MSN tells how sedition law has been challenged and changed in 10 odd countries. I find it equally sad and equally hilarious that the Indian media whose job is to share news and opinion on this topic is being instead of being shared more by MSN. Although, I would be bereft of my duty if I did not share the editorial on the same topic by the Hindu and Deccan Chronicle. Also, an interesting question to ask is, are there only 10 countries in the world that have sedition laws? AFAIK, there are roughly 200 odd countries as recognized by WTO. If 190 odd countries do not have sedition laws, it also tells a lot about them and a lot about the remaining 10. Also, it came to light that police are still filing laws under sec66A which was declared null and void a few years ago. It was replaced with section 124A if memory serves right and it has more checks and balances.

Danish Siddiqui, Pulitzer award-winning and death in Afghanistan Before I start with Danish Siddiqui, let me share an anecdote that I think I have shared on the blog years ago about how photojournalists are. Again, those who know me and those who follow me know how much I am mad both about trains and planes (civil aviation). A few months back, I had shared a blog post about some of the biggest railway systems in the world which shows that privatization of Railways doesn t necessarily lead to up-gradation of services but definitely leads to an increase in tariff/fares. Just had a conversation couple of days ago on Twitter and realized that need to also put a blog post about civil aviation in India and the problems it faces, but I digress. This was about a gentleman who wanted to take a photo of a particular train coming out of a valley at a certain tunnel at two different heights, one from below and one from above the train. This was several years ago, and while I did share that award-winning photograph then, it probably would take me quite a bit of time and effort to again look it up on my blog and share. The logistics though were far more interesting and intricate than I had first even thought of. We came around a couple of days before the train was supposed to pass that tunnel and the valley. More than half a dozen or maybe more shots were taken throughout the day by the cameras. The idea was to see how much light was being captured by the cameras and how much exposure was to be given so that the picture isn t whitened out or is too black. Weather is the strangest of foes for a photojournalist or even photographers, and the more you are in nature, the more unpredictable it is and can be. We were also at a certain height, so care had to be taken in case light rainfall happens or dew falls, both not good for digital cameras. And dew is something which will happen regardless of what you want. So while the two days our gentleman cameraman fiddled with the settings to figure out correct exposure settings, we had one other gentleman who was supposed to take the train from an earlier station and apprise us if the train was late or not. The most ideal time would be at 0600 hrs. When the train would enter the tunnel and come out and the mixture of early morning sun rays, dew, the flowers in the valley, and the train would give a beautiful effect. We could stretch it to maybe 0700 hrs. Anything after that would just be useless, as it wouldn t have the same effect. And of all this depended on nature. If the skies were to remain too dark, nothing we could do about it, if the dewdrops didn t fall it would all be over. On the day of the shoot, we were told by our compatriot that the train was late by half an hour. We sank a little on hearing that news. Although Photoshop and others can do touch-ups, most professionals like to take as authentic a snap as possible. Everything had been set up to perfection. The wide-angle lenses on both the cameras with protections were set up. The tension you could cut with a knife. While we had a light breakfast, I took a bit more and went in the woods to shit and basically not be there. This was too tensed up for me. Returned an hour to find everybody in a good mood. Apparently, the shoot went well. One of the two captured it for good enough. Now, this is and was in a benign environment where the only foe was the environment. A bad shot would have meant another week in the valley, something which I was not looking forward to. Those who have lived with photographers and photojournalists know how self-involved they can be in their craft, while how grumpy they can be if they had a bad shoot. For those, who don t know, it is challenging to be friends with such people for a long time. I wish they would scream more at nature and let out the frustrations they have after a bad shoot. But again, this is in a very safe environment. Now let s cut to Danish Siddiqui and the kind of photojournalism he followed. He followed a much more riskier sort of photojournalism than the one described above. Krittivas Mukherjee in his Twitter thread shared how reporters in most advanced countries are trained in multiple areas, from risk assessment to how to behave in case you are kidnapped, are in riots, hostage situations, etc. They are also trained in all sorts of medical training from treating gunshot wounds, CPR, and other survival methods. They are supposed to carry medical equipment along with their photography equipment. Sadly, these concepts are unknown in India. And even then they get killed. Sadly, he attributes his death to the thrill of taking an exclusive photograph. And the gentleman s bio reads that he is a diplomat. Talk about tone-deafness On another completely different level was Karen Hao who was full of empathy as she shared the humility, grace, warmth and kinship she describes in her interaction with the photojournalist. His body of work can be seen via his ted talk in 2020 where he shared a brief collage of his works. Latest, though in a turnaround, the Taliban have claimed no involvement in the death of photojournalist Danish Siddiqui. This could be in part to show the Taliban in a more favorable light as they do and would want to be showcased as progressive, even though they are forcing that all women within a certain age become concubines or marry the fighters and killing the minority Hazaras or doing vile deeds with them. Meanwhile, statements made by Hillary Clinton almost a decade, 12 years ago have come back into circulation which stated how the U.S. itself created the Taliban to thwart the Soviet Union and once that job was finished, forgot all about it. And then in 2001, it landed back in Afghanistan while the real terrorists were Saudi. To date, not all documents of 9/11 are in the public domain. One can find more information of the same here. This is gonna take probably another few years before Saudi Arabia s whole role in the September 11 attacks will be known. Last but not the least, came to know about the Pegasus spyware and how many prominent people in some nations were targeted, including in mine India. Will not talk more as it s already a big blog post and Pegasus revelations need an article on its own.

• Download your prefered Debian installation media (I am using Bullseye AMD64 netinst beta), and drop this directly onto a USB memory stick (dd)
• Put the USB stick in the laptop and select this as the boot device (on my thinkpad the boot device menu is F12)
• I chose the graphical installation option, but only because it was less key strokes to select
• Select your prefered Locale
  • UI language (English)
  • Enter your location (United Kingdom)
  • and keyboard layout (British English)
• Next DI comes up with a whole host of missing firmware for the detected WiFi I can safely ignore this as I have a network cable plugged in (select No). If I want to enable WiFi I could choose to add media with the firmware at this stage or add it later.
  • I have a network cable plugged in and DI finds and configures my network setup (IPv6 and v4 with DHCP)
• I enter a hostname (I chose to name my machines after lizards this will be called skink)
• I am asked for a domain name (I have koipond.org.uk configured)
• You are then asked for some account details
  • I do not enter a root password as I want the root account login disabled
  • But I do provide my details for a user account

• Create an partition for /boot
  • Select the 400GB free space
  • Create a new partition
  • Enter enough space of /boot (>100MB I select 500 MB)
  • place this at the beginning of the disk
  • Name it (boot)
  • Use as ext2 we don t want journaling here
  • Mount point /boot

• Set up encrypted volumes
  • We need to write the new partition table to disk before we can continue
  • Create encrypted volumes
    • select the large remaining area of free space
    • name it (skink)
    • write disk configuration
    • finish
    • let the system overwrite the partition with random
    • enter a passphrase for the disk

• Set up LVM (inside the encrypted volume)
  • Select Configure Logical Volume Manager
  • Write changes to disk (we do this a lot)
  • Create volume group
    • Give it a name (VG-Skink)
    • Select the encrypted partition
  • Create logical volume (swap)
    • Select the volume group to use (VG-Skink)
    • Enter a name (LV-Swap)
    • Enter size of swap (32G)
  • Create logical volume (system)
    • Select the volume group to use (VG-Skink)
    • Enter a name (LV-System)
    • Enter size of swap (remaining space)
  • Finish

• Select your LVM VG for swap
  • Use as: Swap area
  • Done Setting up partition
• Select your LVM VG for system
  • Use as: Ext4 journaling file system
  • Mount point: / the root filing system
  • Mount options: I select discard (trim function as this makes a considerable improvement to the disk performance and life)

• Finish partitioning and write changes to disk
  • Write the changes to disk

• Configure package manager Select nearest mirror (I run a local mirror so select enter information manually)
• Yes I do want to take part in popcon (Debian uses this as a guide to how many instances of each package are installed I select this for anything other than test installs)
• Software Selection
  • I will have a desktop environment and I currently use KDE
  • I would like an ssh server to be installed
  • I want the standard system utilities

The Rise of the Zamindar Around the 15th century when Babur Invaded Hindustan, he realized that Hindustan is too big a country to be governed alone. And Hindustan was much broader than independent India today. So he created the title of Zamindars. Interestingly, if you look at the Mughal period, they were much more in tune with Hindustani practices than the British who came later. They used the caste divisions and hierarchy wisely making sure that the status quo was maintained as far as castes/creed were concerned. While in-fighting with various rulers continued, it was more or less about land and power other than anything else. When the Britishers came they co-opted the same arrangement with a minor adjustment. While in the before system, the zamindars didn t have powers to be landowners. The Britishers gave them land ownerships. A huge percentage of thess zamindars especially in Bengal were from my own caste Banias or Baniyas. The problem and the solution for the Britishers had been this was a large land to control and exploit and the number of British officers and nobles were very less. So they gave virtually a lot of powers to the Banias. The only thing the British insisted on were very high rents from the newly minted Zamindars. The Zamindar in turn used the powers of personal fiefdom to give loans at very high interest rates when the poor were unable to pay the interest rate, they would take the land while at the same time slavery was forced on both men and women, many a time rapes and affairs. While there have been many records shedding light on it, don t think it could be any more powerful as enacted and shared by Shabana Azmi in Ankur:the Seedling. Another prominent grouping was formed around the same time was the Bhadralok. Now as shared Bhadralok while having all the amenities of belonging to the community, turned a blind eye to the excesses being done by the Zamindars. How much they played a hand in the decimation of Bengal has been a matter of debate, but they did have a hand, that much is not contested.

The Rise of Stock Exchanges Sadly and interestingly, many people believe and continue to believe that stock exchanges is recent phenomena. The first stock exchange though was the Calcutta Stock Exchange rather than the Bombay Stock Exchange. How valuable was Calcutta to the Britishers in its early years can be gauged from the fact that at one time it was made the capital of India in 1772 . In fact, after the Grand Trunk Road (on which there had been even Train names in both countries) x number of books have been written of the trade between Calcutta and Peshawar (Now in Pakistan). And it was not just limited to trade but also cultural give-and-take between the two centers. Even today, if you look at YT (Youtube) and look up some interviews of old people, you find many interesting anecdotes of people sharing both culture and trade.

The problem of the 60 s and rise of BSE
After India became independent and the Constitutional debates happened, the new elites understood that there cannot be two power centers that could govern India. On one hand, were the politicians who had come to power on the back of the popular vote, the other was the Zamindars, who more often than not had abused their powers which resulted in widespread poverty. The Britishers are to blame, but so do the middlemen as they became willing enablers to the same system of oppression. Hence, you had the 1951 amendment to the Constitution and the 1956 Zamindari Abolition Act. In fact, you can find much more of an in-depth article both about Zamindars and their final abolition here. Now once Zamindari was gone, there was nothing to replace it with. The Zamindars ousted of their old roles turned and tried to become Industrialists. The problem was that the poor and the downtrodden had already had experiences with the Zamindars. Also, some Industrialists from North and West also came to Bengal but they had no understanding of either the language or the cultural understanding of what had happened in Bengal. And notice that I have not talked about both the famines and the floods that wrecked Bengal since time immemorial and some of the ones which got etched on soul of Bengal and has marks even today The psyche of the Bengali and the Bhadralok has gone through enormous shifts. I have met quite a few and do see the guilt they feel. If one wonders as to how socialist parties are able to hold power in Bengal, look no further than Tarikh which tells and shares with you that even today how many Bengalis still feel somewhat lost.

The Rise of BSE Now, while Kolkata Stock Exchange had been going down, for multiple reasons other than listed above. From the 1950s onwards Jawaharlal Nehru had this idea of 5-year plans, borrowed from socialist countries such as Russia, China etc. His vision and ambition for the newly minted Indian state were huge, while at the same time he understood we were poor. The loot by East India Company and the Britishers and on top of that the division of wealth with Pakistan even though the majority of Muslims chose and remained with India. Travel on Indian Railways was a risky affair. My grandfather had shared numerous tales where he used to fill money in socks and put the socks on in boots when going between either Delhi Kolkata or Pune Kolkata. Also, as the Capital became Delhi, it unofficially was for many years, the transparency from Kolkata-based firms became less. So many Kolkata firms either mismanaged and shut down while Maharashtra, my own state, saw a huge boon in Industrialization as well as farming. From the 1960s to the 1990s there were many booms and busts in the stock exchanges but most were manageable.

While the 60s began on a good note as Goa was finally freed from the Portuguese army and influence, the 1962 war with the Chinese made many a soul question where we went wrong. Jawaharlal Nehru went all over the world to ask for help but had to return home empty-handed. Bollywood showed a world of bell-bottoms and cars and whatnot, while the majority were still trying to figure out how to put two square meals on the table. India suffered one of the worst famines in those times. People had to ration food. Families made do with either one meal or just roti (flatbread) rather than rice. In Bengal, things were much more severe. There were huge milk shortages, so Bengalis were told to cut down on sweets. This enraged the Bangalis as nothing else could. Note If one wants to read how bad Indians felt at that time, all one has to read is V.S. Naipaul s An Area of darkness . This was also the time when quite a few Indians took their first step out of India. While Air India had just started, the fares were prohibitive. Those who were not well off, either worked on ships or went via passenger or cargo ships to Dubai/Qatar middle-east. Some went to Russia and some even to States. While today s migr s want to settle in the west forever and have their children and grandchildren grow up in the West, in the 1960s and 70s the idea was far different. The main purpose for a vast majority was to get jobs and whatnot, save maximum money and send it back to India as a remittance. The idea was to make enough money in 3-5-10 years, come back to India, and then lead a comfortable life. Sadly, there has hardly been any academic work done in India, at least to my knowledge to document the sacrifices done by Indians in search of jobs, life, purpose, etc. in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1970s was also when alternative cinema started its journey with people like Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah who portrayed people s struggles on-screen. Most of them didn t have commercial success because the movies and the stories were bleak. While the acting was superb, most Indians loved to be captured by fights, car-chases, and whatnot rather than the deary existence which they had. And the alt cinema forced them to look into the mirror, which was frowned upon both by the masses and the classes. So cinema which could have been a wake-up call for a lot of Indians failed. One of the most notable works of that decade, at least to me, was Manthan. 1961 was also marked by the launch of Economic Times and Financial Express which tells that there was some appetite for financial news and understanding. The 1970s was also a very turbulent time in the corporate sector and stock exchanges. Again, the companies which were listed were run by the very well-off and many of them had been abroad. At the same time, you had fly-by-night operators. One of the happenings which started in this decade is you had corporate wars and hostile takeovers, quite a few of them of which could well have a Web series or two of their own. This was also a decade marked by huge labor unrest, which again changed the face of Bombay/Mumbai. From the 1950s till the 1970s, Bombay was known for its mills. So large migrant communities from all over India came to Bombay to become the next Bollywood star and if that didn t happen, they would get jobs in the mills. Bombay/Mumbai has/had this unique feature that somehow you will make money to make ends meet. Of course, with the pandemic, even that has gone for a toss. Labor unrest was a defining character of that decade. Three movies, Kaala Patthar, Kalyug, and Ankush give a broad outlook of what happened in that decade. One thing which is present and omnipresent then and now is how time and time again we lost our demographic dividend. Again there was an exodus of young people who ventured out to seek fortunes elsewhere. The 1970s and 80s were also famous for the license Raj which they bought in. Just like the Soviets, there were waiting periods for everything. A telephone line meant waiting for things anywhere from 4 to 8 years. In 1987, when we applied and got a phone within 2-3 months, most of my relatives both from my mother and father s side could not believe we paid 0 to get a telephone line. We did pay the telephone guy INR 10/- which was a somewhat princely sum when he was installing it, even then they could not believe it as in Northern India, you couldn t get a phone line even if your number had come. You had to pay anywhere from INR 500/1000 or more to get a line. This was BSNL and to reiterate there were no alternatives at that time.

The 1990s and the Harshad Mehta Scam The 90s was when I was a teenager. You do all the stupid things for love, lust, whatever. That is also the time you are introduced really to the world of money. During my time, there were only three choices, Sciences, Commerce, and Arts. If History were your favorite subject then you would take Arts and if it was not, and you were not studious, then you would up commerce. This is how careers were chosen. So I enrolled in Commerce. Due to my grandfather and family on my mother s side interested in stocks both as a saving and compounding tool, I was able to see Pune Stock Exchange in action one day. The only thing I remember that day is people shouting loudly with various chits. I had no idea that deals of maybe thousands or even lakhs. The Pune Stock Exchange had been newly minted. I also participated in a couple of mock stock exchanges and came to understand that one has to be aggressive in order to win. You had to be really loud to be heard over others, you could not afford to be shy. Also, spread your risks. Sadly, nothing about the stock markets was there in the syllabus. 1991 was also when we saw the Iraq war, the balance of payments crisis in India, and didn t know that the Harshad Mehta scam was around the corner. Most of the scams in India have been caught because the person who was doing it was flashy. And this was the reason that even he was caught as Ms. Sucheta Dalal, a young beat reporter from Indian Express who had been covering Indian stock market. Many of her articles were thought-provoking. Now, a brief understanding is required to know before we actually get to the scam. Because of the 1991 balance of payments crisis, IMF rescued India on the condition that India throws its market open. In the 1980s itself, Rajeev Gandhi had wanted to partially make India open but both politicians and Industrialists advised him not to do the same, we are/were not ready. On 21st May 1991, Rajeev Gandhi was assassinated by the LTTE. A month later, due to the sympathy vote, the Narsimha Rao Govt. took power. While for most new Governments there is usually a honeymoon period lasting 6 months or so till they get settled in their roles before people start asking tough questions. It was not to be for this Govt. Immediately, The problem had been building for a few years. Although, in many ways, our economy was better than it is today. The only thing India didn t do well at that time was managing foreign exchange. As only a few Indians had both the money and the opportunity to go abroad and need for electronics was limited. One of the biggest imports of the time then and still today is Energy, Oil. While today it is Oil/Gas and electronics, at that time it was only OIl. The Oil import bill was ballooning while exports were more or less stagnant and mostly comprised of raw materials rather than finished products. Even today, it is largely this, one of the biggest Industrialists in India Ambani exports gas/oil while Adani exports coal. Anyways, the deficit was large enough to trigger a payment crisis. And Narsimha Rao had to throw open the Indian market almost overnight. Some changes became quickly apparent, while others took a long time to come.

Satellite Television and Entry of Foreign Banks Almost overnight, from 1 channel we became multi-channel. Star TV (Rupert Murdoch) bought us Bold and Beautiful, while CNN broadcasted the Iraq War. It was unbelievable for us that we were getting reports of what had happened 24-48 hours earlier. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was still very much a teenager to understand the import of what was happening. Even in my college, except for one or two-person, it wasn t a topic for debate or talk or even the economy. We were basically somehow cocooned in our own little world. But this was not the case for the rest of India and especially banks. The entry of foreign banks was a rude shock to Indian banks. The foreign banks were bringing both technology and sophistication in their offerings, and Indian Banks needed and wanted fast money to show hefty profits. Demand for credit wasn t much, at least nowhere the level it today is. At the same time, default on credit was nowhere high as today is. But that will require its own space and article. To quench the thirst for hefty profits by banks, Enter Harshad Mehta. At that point in time, banks were not permitted at all to invest in the securities/share market. They could only buy Government securities or bonds which had a coupon rate of say 8-10% which was nowhere enough to satisfy the need for hefty profits as desired by Indian banks. On top of it, that cash was blocked for a long time. Most of these Government bonds had anywhere between 10-20 year maturity date and some even longer. Now, one loophole in that was that the banks themselves could not buy these securities. They had to approach a registered broker of the share market who will do these transactions on their behalf. Here is where Mr. Mehta played his game. He shared both legal and illegal ways in which both the bank and he would prosper. While banking at one time was thought to be conservative and somewhat cautious, either because they were too afraid that Western private banks will take that pie or whatever their reasons might be, they agreed to his antics. To play the game, Harshad Mehta needed lots of cash, which the banks provided him in the guise of buying securities that were never bought, but the amounts were transferred to his account. He actively traded stocks, at the same time made a group, and also made the rumor mill work to his benefit. The share market is largely a reactionary market. It operates on patience, news, and rumor-mill. The effect of his shenanigans was that the price of a stock that was trending at say INR 200 reached the stratospheric height of INR 9000/- without any change in the fundamentals or outlook of the stock. His thirst didn t remain restricted to stocks but also ventured into the unglamorous world of Govt. securities where he started trading even in them in large quantities. In order to attract new clients, he coveted a fancy lifestyle. The fancy lifestyle was what caught the eye of Sucheta Dalal, and she started investigating the deals he was doing. Being a reporter, she had the advantage of getting many doors to open and get information that otherwise would be under lock and key. On 23rd April 1992, Sucheta Dalal broke the scam.

The Impact The impact was almost like a shock to the markets. Even today, it can be counted as one of the biggest scams in the Indian market if you adjust it for inflation. I haven t revealed much of the scam and what happened, simply because Sucheta Dalal and Debasis Basu wrote The Scam for that purpose. How do I shorten a story and experience which has been roughly written in 300 odd pages in one or two paragraphs, it is simply impossible. The impact though was severe. The Indian stock market became a bear market for two years. Sucheta Dalal was kicked out/made to resign out of Indian Express. The thing is simple, all newspapers survive on readership and advertisements with advertisements. Companies who were having a golden run, whether justified or not, on the bourses/Stock Exchange. For many companies, having a good number on the stock exchange was better than the company fundamentals. There was supposed to be a speedy fast-track court setup for Financial crimes, but it worked only for the Harshad Mehta case and still took over 5 years. It led to the creation of NSE (National Stock Exchange). It also led to the creation of SEBI, perhaps one of the most powerful regulators, giving it a wide range of powers and remit but on the ground more often that proved to be no more than a glorified postman. And the few times it used, it used on the wrong people and people had to go to courts to get justice. But then this is not about SEBI nor is this blog post about NSE. I have anyways shared about Absolute power above, so will not repeat the link here. The Anecdotal impact was widespread. Our own family broker took the extreme step. For my grandfather on the mother s side, he was like the second son. The news of his suicide devastated my grandfather quite a bit, which we realized much later when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer s. Our family stockbroker had been punting, taking lots of cash from the market at very high rates, betting on stocks wildly as the stock market was reaching for the stars when the market crashed, he was insolvent. How the family survived is a tale in itself. They had just got married just a few years ago and had a cute boy and girl soon after. While today, both are grown-up, at that time what the wife faced only she knows. There were also quite a few shareholders who also took the extreme step. The stock markets in those days were largely based on trust and even today is unless you are into day-trading. So there was always some money left on the table for the share/stockbroker which would be squared off in the next deal/transaction where again you will leave something. My grandfather once thought of going over and meeting them, and we went to the lane where their house is, seeing the line of people who had come for recovery of loans, we turned back with a heavy heart. There was another taboo that kinda got broken that day. The taboo was that the stock market is open to scams. From 1992 to 2021 has been a cycle of scams. Even now, today, the stock market is at unnatural highs. We know for sure that a lot of hot money is rolling around, a lot of American pension funds etc. Till it will work, it will work, some news something and that money will be moved out. Who will be left handing the can, the Indian investors? A Few days back, Ambani writes about Adani. Now while the facts shared are correct, is Adani the only one, the only company to have a small free float in the market. There probably are more than 1/4th or 1/3rd of well-respected companies who may have a similar configuration, the only problem is it is difficult to know who the proxies are. Now if I were to reflect and compare this either with the 1960s or even the 1990s I don t find much difference apart from the fact that the proxy is sitting in Mauritius. At the same time, today you can speculate on almost anything. Whether it is stocks, commodities, derivatives, foreign exchange, cricket matches etc. the list is endless. Since 2014, the rise in speculation rather than investment has been dramatic, almost stratospheric. Sadly, there are no studies or even attempts made to document this. How much official and unofficial speculation is there in the market nobody knows. Money markets have become both fluid and non-transparent. In theory, you have all sorts of regulators, but it is still very much like the Wild West. One thing to note that even Income tax had to change and bring it provisions to account for speculative income.So, starting from being totally illegitimate, it has become kind of legal and is part of Income Tax. And if speculation is not wrong, why not make Indian cricket officially a speculative event, that will be honest and GOI will get part of the proceeds.

Conclusion I wish there was some positive conclusion I could drive, but sadly there is not. Just today read two articles about the ongoing environmental issues in Himachal Pradesh. As I had shared even earlier, the last time I visited those places in 2011, and even at that time I was devastated to see the kind of construction going on. Jogiwara Road which they showed used to be flat single ground/first floor dwellings, most of which were restaurants and whatnot. I had seen the water issues both in Himachal and UT (Uttarakhand) back then and this is when they made huge dams. In U.S. they are removing dams and here we want more dams

Accessibility This is perhaps one of the strangest ways and yet also perhaps the straightest way to start the blog post. For the past weeks/months, a strange experience has been there. I am using a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse for almost a decade. Now, for the past few months and weeks we observed a somewhat rare phenomena . While in-between us we have a single desktop computer. So me and mum take turns to be on the Desktop. At times, however, the system would sit idle and after some time it goes to low-power mode/sleep mode after 30 minutes. Then, when you want to come back, you obviously have to give your login credentials. At times, the keyboard refuses to input any data in the login screen. Interestingly, the mouse still functions. Much more interesting is the fact that both the mouse and the keyboard use the same transceiver sensor to send data. And I had changed batteries to ensure it was not a power issue but still no input :(. While my mother uses and used the power switch (I did teach her how to hold it for few minutes and then let it go) but for self, tried another thing. Using the mouse I logged of the session thinking perhaps some race condition or something might be in the session which was not letting the keystrokes be inputted into the system and having a new session might resolve it. But this was not to be Luckily, on the screen you do have the option to reboot or power off. I did a reboot and lo, behold the system was able to input characters again. And this has happened time and again. I tried to find GOK and failed to remember that GOK had been retired. I looked up the accessibility page on Debian wiki. Very interesting, very detailed but sadly it did not and does not provide the backup I needed. I tried out florence but found that the app. is buggy. Moreover, the instructions provided on the lightdm screen does not work. I do not get the on-screen keyboard while I followed the instructions. Just to be clear this is all on Debian testing which is gonna be Debian stable soonish I even tried the same with xvkbd but no avail. I do use mate as my desktop-manager so maybe the instructions need some refinement ???? $ cat /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf grep keyboard
# a11y-states = states of accessibility features: name save state on exit, -name
disabled at start (default value for unlisted), +name enabled at start. Allowed names: contrast, font, keyboard, reader.
keyboard=xvkbd no-gnome focus &
# keyboard-position = x y[;width height] ( 50%,center -0;50% 25% by default) Works only for onboard
#keyboard= Interestingly, Debian does provide two more on-screen keyboards, matchbox as well as onboard which comes from Ubuntu. While I have both of them installed. I find xvkbd to be enough for my work, the only issue seems to be I cannot get it from the drop-down box of accessibility at the login screen. Just to make sure that I have not gone to Gnome-display manager, I did run

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3 Only to find out that I am indeed running lightdm. So I am a bit confused why it doesn t come up as an option when I have the login window/login manager running. FWIW I do run metacity as the window manager as it plays nice with all the various desktop environments I have, almost all of them. So this is where I m stuck. If I do get any help, I probably would also add those instructions to the wiki page, so it would be convenient to the next person who comes with the same issue. I also need to figure out some way to know whether there is some race-condition or something which is happening, have no clue how would I go about it without having whole lot of noise. I am sure there are others who may have more of an idea. FWIW, I did search unix.stackexchange as well as reddit/debian to see if I could see any meaningful posts but came up empty.

Freenode I had not been using IRC for quite some time now. The reasons have been multiple issues with Riot (now element) taking the whole space on my desktop. I did get alerted to the whole thing about a week after the whole thing went down. Somebody messaged me DM. I *think* I put up a thread or a mini-thread about IRC or something in response to somebody praising telegram/WhatsApp or one of those apps. That probably triggered the DM. It took me a couple of minutes to hit upon this. I was angry and depressed, seeing the behavior of the new overlords of freenode. I did see that lot of channels moved over to Libera. It was also interesting to see that some communities were thinking of moving to some other obscure platform, which again could be held hostage to the same thing. One could argue one way or the other, but that would be tiresome and fact is any network needs lot of help to be grown and nurtured, whether it is online or offline. I also saw that Libera was also using a software Solanum which is ircv3 compliant. Now having done this initial investigation, it was time to move to an IRC client. The Libera documentation is and was pretty helpful in telling which IRC clients would be good with their network. So I first tried hexchat. I installed it and tried to add Libera server credentials, it didn t work. Did see that they had fixed the bug in sid/unstable and now it s in testing. But at the time it was in sid, the bug-fixed and I wanted to have something which just ran the damn thing. I chanced upon quassel. I had played around with quassel quite a number of times before, so I knew I could play/use it. Hence, I installed it and was able to use it on the first try. I did use the encrypted server and just had to tweak some settings before I could use it with some help with their documentation. Although, have to say that even quassel upstream needs to get its documentation in order. It is just all over the place, and they haven t put any effort into streamlining the documentation, so that finding things becomes easier. But that can be said of many projects upstream. There is one thing though that all of these IRC clients lack. The lack of a password manager. Now till that isn t fixed it will suck because you need another secure place to put your password/s. You either put it on your desktop somewhere (insecure) or store it in the cloud somewhere (somewhat secure but again need to remember that password), whatever you do is extra work. I am sure there will be a day when authenticating with Nickserv will be an automated task and people can just get on talking on channels and figuring out how to be part of the various communities. As can be seen, even now there is a bit of a learning curve for both newbies and people who know a bit about systems to get it working. Now, I know there are a lot of things that need to be fixed in the anonymity, security place if I put that sort of hat. For e.g. wouldn t it be cool if either the IRC client or one of its add-on gave throwaway usernames and passwords. The passwords would be complex. This would make it easier who are paranoid about security and many do and would have. As an example we can see of Fuchs. Now if the gentleman or lady is working in a professional capacity and would come to know of their real identity and perceive rightly or wrongly the role of that person, it will affect their career. Now, should it? I am sure a lot of people would be divided on the issue. Personally, as far as I am concerned, I would say no because whether right or wrong, whatever they were doing they were doing on their own time. Not on company time. So it doesn t concern the company at all. If we were to let companies police the behavior outside the time, individuals would be in a lot of trouble. Although, have to say that is a trend that has been seen in companies that are firing people either on the left or right. A recent example that comes to mind is Emily Wilder who was fired by Associated Press. Interestingly, she was interviewed by Democracy now, and it did come out that she is a Jew. As can be seen and understood there is a lot of nuance to her story and not the way she was fired. It doesn t give a good taste in the mouth, but then getting fired nobody does. On few forums, people did share of people getting fired of their job because they were dancing (cops). Again, it all depends, for me again, hats off to anybody who feels like dancing or whatever because there are just so many depressing stories all around.

Banned and FOE On few forums I was banned because I was talking about Brexit and American imperialism, both of which are seem to ruffle a few feathers in quite a few places. For instance, many people for obvious reasons do not like this video

Now I m sorry I am not able to and have not been able to give invidious links for the past few months. The reason being invidious itself went through some changes and the changes are good and bad. For e.g. now you need to share your google id with a third-party which at least to my mind is not a good idea. But that probably is another story altogether and it probably will need its own place. Coming back to the video itself, this was shared by Anthony hazard and the Title is The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you . I did see this video quite a few years ago and still find it hard to swallow that tens of millions of Africans were bought as slaves to the Americas, although to be fair it does start with the Spanish settlement in the land which would be called the U.S. but they bought slaves with themselves. They even got the American natives, i.e. people from different tribes which made up America at that point. One point to note is that U.S. got its independence on July 4, 1776 so all the people before that were called as European settlers for want of a better word. Some or many of these European settlers would be convicts who were sent from UK. But as shared in the article, that would only happen with U.S. itself is mature and open enough for that discussion. Going back to the original point though, these European or American settlers bought lot of slaves from Africa. The video does also shed some of the cruelty the Europeans or Americans did on the slaves, men and women in different ways. The most revelatory part though which I also forget many a times that because lot of people were taken from Africa and many of them men, it did lead to imbalances in the African societies not just in weddings but economics in general. It also developed a theory called Critical Race theory in which it tries to paint the Africans as an inferior race otherwise how would Christianity work where their own good book says All men are born equal . That does in part explain why the African countries are still so far behind their European or American counterparts. But Africa can still be proud as they are richer than us, yup India. Sadly, I don t think America is ready to have that conversation anytime soon or if ever. And if it were to do, it would have to out-do any truth and reconciliation Committee which the world has seen. A mere apology or two would not just cut it. The problems of America sadly are not limited to just Africans but the natives of the land, for e.g. the Lakota people. In 1868, they put a letter stating we will give the land back to the Lakota people forever, but then the gold rush happened. In 2007, when the Lakota stated their proposal for independence, the U.S. through its force denied. So much for the paper, it was written on. Now from what I came to know over the years, the American natives are called First nations . Time and time again the American Govt. has tried or been foul towards them. Some of the examples include The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository . The same is and was the case with The Keystone pipeline which is now dead. Now one could say that it is America s internal matter and I would fully agree but when they speak of internal matters of other countries, then we should have the same freedom. But this is not restricted to just internal matters, sadly. Since the 1950 s i.e. the advent of the cold war, America s foreign policy made Regime changes all around the world. Sharing some of the examples from the Cold War

Iran 1953
Guatemala 1954
Democratic Republic of the Congo 1960
Republic of Ghana 1966
Iraq 1968
Chile 1973
Argentina 1976
Afghanistan 1978-1980s
Grenada
Nicaragua 1981-1990
1. Destabilization through CIA assets
2. Arming the Contras
El Salvador 1980-92
Philippines 1986 Even after the Cold War ended the situation was anonymolus, meaning they still continued with their old behavior. After the end of Cold War

Guatemala 1993
Serbia 2000
Iraq 2003-
Afghanistan 2001 ongoing There is a helpful Wikipedia article titled History of CIA which basically lists most of the covert regime changes done by U.S. The abvoe is merely a sub-set of the actions done by U.S. Now are all the behaviors above of a civilized nation ? And if one cares to notice, one would notice that all the above countries in the list which had the regime change had either Oil or precious metals. So U.S. is and was being what it accuses China, a profiteer. But this isn t just the U.S. China story but more about the American abuse of its power. My own country, India paid IMF loans till 1991 and we paid through the nose. There were economic sanctions against India. But then, this is again not just about U.S. India. Even with Europe or more precisely Norway which didn t want to side with America because their intelligence showed that no WMD were present in Iraq, the relationship still has issues.

Pandemic and the World So I do find that this whole blaming of China by U.S. quite theatrical and full of double-triple standards. Very early during the debates, it came to light that the Spanish Flu actually originated in Kensas, U.S.

What was also interesting as I found in the Pentagon Papers much before The Watergate scandal came out that U.S. had realized that China would be more of a competitor than Russia. And this itself was in 1960 s itself. This shows the level of intelligence that the Americans had. From what I can recollect from whatever I have read of that era, China was still mostly an agri-based economy. So, how the U.S. was able to deduce that China will surpass other economies is beyond me even now. They surely must have known something that even we today do not. One of the other interesting observations and understanding that I got while researching that every year we transfer an average of 7500 diseases from animal to humans and that should be a scary figure. I think more than anything else, loss of habitat and use of animals from food to clothing to medicine is probably the reason we are getting such diseases. I am also sure that there probably are and have been similar number of transfer of diseases from humans to animals as well but for well-known biases and whatnot those studies are neither done or are under-funded. There are and have been reports of something like 850,000 undiscovered viruses which various mammals and birds have. Also I did find that most of such pandemics are hard to identify, for e.g. SARS 1 took about 15 years, Ebola we don t know till date from where it came. Even HIV has questions for us. Hell, even why does hearing go away is a mystery to us. In all of this, we want to say China is culpable. And while China may or may not be culpable, only time will tell, this is surely the opportunity for all countries to spend and make capacities in public health. Countries which will take lessons from it and improve their public healthcare models will hopefully will not suffer as those who will suffer and are continuing to suffer now To those who feel that habitat loss of animals is untrue, I would suggest them to see Sherni which depicts the human/animal conflict in all its brutality. I am gonna warn in advance that the ending is not nice but what can you expect from a country in which forest area cover has constantly declined and the Govt. itself is only interested in headline management

The only positive story I can share from India is that finally the Modi Govt. has said we will do free vaccine immunization for everybody. Although the pace is nothing to write home about. One additional thing they relaxed was instead of going to Cowin or any other portal, people could simply walk in using their identity papers. Although, given the pace of vaccinations, it is going to take anywhere between 13-18 months or more depending on availability of vaccines.

Looking forward to all and any replies have a virtual keyboard, preferably xvkbd as that is good enough for my use-case.

This flag indicates that filesystem links, if they exist, should be followed.

# Attempt to set the perms of the symlink but be
# careful not to change the perms of the underlying
# file while trying
underlying_stat = os.stat(b_path)
os.chmod(b_path, mode)
new_underlying_stat = os.stat(b_path)
if underlying_stat.st_mode != new_underlying_stat.st_mode:
    os.chmod(b_path, stat.S_IMODE(underlying_stat.st_mode))

fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! =>  "changed": false, "details": "maximum recursion depth exceeded", "gid": 1000, "group": "enrico", "mode": "0755", "msg": "mode must be in octal or symbolic form", "owner": "enrico", "path": "/tmp/test/test1", "size": 0, "state": "directory", "uid": 1000 

---
- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
   - name: create test file
     file:
        path: /tmp/testfile
        state: touch
   - name: create test link
     file:
        path: /tmp/testlink
        state: link
        src: /tmp/testfile
   - name: turn it into a hard link
     file:
        path: /tmp/testlink
        state: hard
        src: /tmp/testfile

$ ansible-playbook test3.yaml
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match 'all'
PLAY [localhost] ************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [create test file] *****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost]
TASK [create test link] *****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost]
TASK [turn it into a hard link] *********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=4    changed=2    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

---
- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
   - name: create test dir
     file:
        path: /tmp/testdir
        state: directory
   - name: turn it into a symlink
     file:
        path: /tmp/testdir
        state: hard
        src: /tmp/
        force: yes

$ ansible-playbook test4.yaml
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match 'all'
PLAY [localhost] ************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [create test dir] ******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost]
TASK [turn it into a symlink] ***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! =>  "changed": false, "gid": 1000, "group": "enrico", "mode": "0755", "msg": "Error while replacing: [Errno 21] Is a directory: b'/tmp/testdir'", "owner": "enrico", "path": "/tmp/testdir", "size": 0, "state": "directory", "uid": 1000 
PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=1    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

if (st1.st_dev, st1.st_ino) == (st2.st_dev, st2.st_ino):

The Great Electric Airplane Race It took me quite sometime to write as have been depressed about things. Then a few days back saw Nova s The Great Electric Airplane Race. While it was fabulous and a pleasure to see and know that there are more than 200 odd startups who are in the race of making an electric airplane which works and has FAA certification. I was disappointed though that there no coverage of any University projects. From what little I know, almost all advanced materials which U.S. had made has been first researched in mostly Universities and when it is close to fruition then either spin-off as a startup or give to some commercial organization/venture to make it scalable and profitable. If they had, I am sure more people could be convinced to join sciences and engineering in college. I actually do want to come to this as part of both general medicine and vaccine development in U.S. but will come later. The idea that industry works alone should be discouraged, but that perhaps may require another article to articulate why I believe so.

Medical Device Ventilators in India Before the pandemic, probably most didn t know what a ventilator is and was, at least I didn t, although I probably used it during my somewhat brief hospital stay a couple of years ago. It entered into the Indian twitter lexicon more so in the second wave as the number of people who got infected became more and more and the ventilators which were serving them became less and less just due to sheer mismatch of numbers and requirements. Rich countries donated/gifted ventilators to India on which GOI put GST of 28%. Apparently, they are a luxury item, just like my hearing aid. Last week Delhi High Court passed a judgement that imposition of GST should not be on a gift like ventilators or oxygenators. The order can be found here. Even without reading the judgement the shout from the right was judicial activism while after reading it is a good judgement which touches on several points. The first, in itself, stating the dichotomy that if a commercial organization wanted to import a ventilator or an oxygenator the IGST payable is nil while for an individual it is 12%. The State (here State refers to State Government in this case Gujarat Govt.) did reduce the IGST for state from 12% to NIL IGST for federal states but that to till only 30.06.2021. No relief to individuals on that account. The Court also made use of Mr. Arvind Datar, as Amicus Curiae or friend of court. The petitioner, an 85-year-old gentleman who has put it up has put broad assertions under Article 21 (right to live) and the court in its wisdom also added Article 14 which enshrines equality of everyone before law. The Amicus Curiae, as his duty, guided the court into how the IGST law works and shared a brief history of the law and the changes happening before and after it. During his submissions, he also shared the Mega Exemption Notification no. 50/2017 under which several items are there which are exempted from putting IGST. The Amicus Curiae did note that such exemptions were also there before Mega Exemption Notification had come into play. However, DGFT (Directorate General of Foreign Trade) on 30-04-2021 issued notification No. 4/2015-2020 through which oxygenators had been exempted from Custom Duty/BCD (Basic Customs Duty. In another notification on no. 30/2021 dated 01.05.2021 it reduced IGST from 28% to 12% for personal use. If however the oxygenator was procured by a canalizing agency (bodies such as State Trading Corporation of India (STC) or/and Metals and Minerals Corporation (MMTC) and such are defined as canalising agents) then it will be fully exempted from paying any sort of IGST, albeit subject to certain conditions. What the conditions are were not shared in the open court. The Amicus Curiae further observed that it is contrary to practice where both BCD and IGST has been exempted for canalising agents and others, some IGST has to be paid for personal use. To share within the narrow boundaries of the topic, he shared entry no. 607A of General Exemption no.190 where duty and IGST in case of life-saving drugs are zero provided the life-saving drugs imported have been provided by zero cost from an overseas supplier for personal use. He further shared that the oxygen generator would fall in the same entry of 607A as it fulfills all the criteria as shared for life-saving medicines and devices. He also used the help of Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940 which provides such a relief. The Amicus Curiae further noted that GOI amended its foreign trade policy (2015-2020) via notification no.4/2015-2020, dated 30.04.2021, issued by DGFT where Rakhi and life-saving drugs for personal use has been exempted from BCD till 30-07-2021. No reason not to give the same exemption to oxygenators which fulfill the same thing. The Amicus Curiae, further observes that there are exceptional circumstances provisions as adverted to in sub-section (2) of Section 25 of the Customs Act, whereby Covid-19 which is known and labelled as a pandemic where the distinctions between the two classes of individuals or agencies do not make any sense. While he did make the observation that exemption from duty is not a right, in the light of the pandemic and Article 14, it does not make sense to have distinctions between the two classes of importers. He further shared from Circular no. 9/2014-Customs, dated 19.08.2014 by CBEC (Central Board of Excise and Customs) which gave broad exemptions under Section 25 (2) of the same act in respect of goods and services imported for safety and rehabilitation of people suffering and effected by natural disasters and epidemics. He further submits that the impugned notification is irrational as there is no intelligible differentia rule applied or observed in classifying the import of oxygen concentrators into two categories. One, by the State and its agencies; and the other, by an individual for personal use by way of gift. So there was an absence of adequate determining principle . To bolster his argument, he shared the judgements of

a) Union of India vs. N.S. Rathnam & Sons, (2015) 10 SCC 681 (N.S. Ratnams and Sons Case) b) Shayara Bano vs. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 1 (Shayara Bano Case) The Amicus Curiae also rightly observed that the right to life also encompasses within it, the right to health. You cannot have one without the other and within that is the right to have affordable treatment. He further stated that the state does not only have a duty but a positive obligation is cast upon it to ensure that the citizen s health is secured. He again cited Navtej Singh Johars vs Union of India (Navtej Singh Johar Case) in defence of right to life. Mr. Datar also shared that unlike in normal circumstances, it is and should be enough to show distinct and noticeable burdensomeness which is directly attributable to the impugned/questionable tax. The gentleman cited Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Private Limited vs. Union of India, (1985) 1 SCC 641 (Indian Express case) 1985 which shared both about Article 19 (1) (a) and Article 21. Bloggers note At this juncture, I should point out which I am sharing the judgement and I would be sharing only the Amicus Curiae POV and then the judge s final observations. While I was reading it, I was stuck by the fact that the Amicus Curiae had cited 4 cases till now, 3 of them are pretty well known both in the legal fraternity and even among public at large. Another 3 which have been shared below which are also of great significance. Hence, felt the need to share the whole judgement. The Amicus Curiae further observed that this tax would have to be disproportionately will have to be paid by the old and the infirm, and they might find it difficult to pay the amounts needed to pay the customs duty/IGST as well as find the agent to pay in this pandemic. Blogger Note The situation with the elderly is something like this. Now there are a few things to note, only Central Govt. employees and pensioners get pensions which has been freezed since last year. The rest of the elderly population does not. The rate of interest has fallen to record lows from 5-6% in savings interest rate to 2% and on Fixed Deposits at 4.9% while the nominal inflation rate has up by 6% while CPI and real inflation rates are and would be much more. And this is when there is absolutely no demand in the economy. To add to all this, RBI shared a couple of months ago that fraud of 5 trillion rupees has been committed between 2015 and 2019 in banks. And this is different from the number of record NPA s that have been both in Public and Private Sector banks. To get out of this, the banks have squeezed their customers and are squeezing as well as asking GOI for bailouts. How much GOI is responsible for the frauds as well as NPA s would probably require its own space. And even now, RBI and banks have made heavy provisions as lockdowns are still a facet and are supposed to remain a facet till the end of the year or even next year (all depending upon when we get the vaccine). The Amicus Curiae further argued that the ventilators which are available locally are of bad quality. The result of all this has resulted in a huge amount of unsurmountable pressure on hospitals which they are unable to overcome. Therefore, the levy of IGST on oxygenators has direct impact on health of the citizen. So the examination of the law should not be by what intention it was but how it is affecting citizen rights now. For this he shared R.C.Cooper vs Union of India (another famous case R.C. Cooper vs Union of India) especially paragraph 49 and Federation of Hotel & Restaurant Association of India vs. Union of India, (1989) at paragraph 46 (Federation of Hotel Case) Mr. Datar further shared the Supreme Court order dated 18.12.2020, passed in Suo Moto Writ Petition(Civil) No.7/2020, to buttress the plea that the right to health includes the right to affordable treatment. Blogger s Note For those, who don t know Suo Moto is when the Court, whether Supreme Court or the High Courts take up a matter for public good. It could be in anything, law and order, Banking, Finance, Public Health etc. etc. This was the norm before 2014. The excesses of the executive were curtailed by both the Higher and the lower Judiciary. That is and was the reason that Judiciary is and was known as the third pillar of Indian democracy. A good characterization of Suo Moto can be found here. Before ending his submission, the learned Amicus Curiae also shared Jeeja Ghosh vs. Union of India, (2016) (Jeeja Ghosh Case, an outstanding case as it deals with people with disabilities and their rights and the observations made by the Division Bench of Hon ble Mr. Justice A. K. Sikri as well as Hon ble Mr. Justice R. K. Agrawal.) After Amicus Curiae completed his submissions, it was the turn of Mr. Sudhir Nandrajog, and he adopted the arguments and submissions made by the Amicus Curiae. The gentleman reiterated the facts of the case and how the impugned notification was violative of both Article 14 and 21 of the Indian Constitution. Blogger s Note The High Court s judgement which shows all the above arguments by the Amicus Curiae and the petitioner s lawyer also shared the State s view. It is only on page 24, where the Delhi High Court starts to share its own observations on the arguments of both sides. Judgement continued The first observation that the Court makes is that while the petitioner demonstrated that the impugned tax imposition would have a distinct and noticeable burdensomeness while the State did not state or share in any way how much of a loss it would incur if such a tax were let go and how much additional work would have to be done in order to receive this specific tax. It didn t need to do something which is down the wire or mathematically precise, but it didn t even care to show even theoretically how many people will be affected by the above. The counter-affidavit by the State is silent on the whole issue. The Court also contended that the State failed to prove how collecting IGST from the concerned individuals would help in fighting coronavirus in any substantial manner for the public at large. The High Court shared observations from the Navtej Singh Johar case where it is observed that the State has both negative and positive obligations to ensure that its citizens are able to enjoy the right to health. The High Court further made the point that no respectable person does like to be turned into a charity case. If the State contends that those who obey the law should pay the taxes then it is also obligatory on the state s part to lessen exactions such as taxes at the very least in times of war, famine, floods, epidemics and pandemics. Such an approach would lead a person to live a life of dignity which is part of Article 21 of the Constitution. Another point that was made by the State that only the GST council is able to make any changes as regards to exemptions rather than the State were found to be false as the State had made some exemptions without going to the GST council using its own powers under Section 25 of the Customs Act. The Court also points out that it does send a discriminatory pattern when somebody like petitioner has to pay the tax for personal use while those who are buying it for commercial use do not have to pay the tax. The Court agreed of the view of the Amicus Curiae, Mr. Datar that oxygenator should be taxed at NIL rate at IGST as it is part of life-saving drugs and oxygenator fits the bill as medical equipment as it is used in the treatment, mitigation and prevention of spread of Coronavirus. Mr. Datar also did show that oxygenator is placed at the same level as other life-saving drugs. The Court felt further emboldened as the observations by Supreme Court in State of Andhra Pradesh vs. Linde India Limited, 2020 ( State of Andhra Pradesh vs Linde Ltd.) The Court further shared many subsequent notifications from the State and various press releases by the State itself which does make the Court s point that oxygenators indeed are drugs as defined in the court case above. The State should have it as part of notification 190. This would preserve the start of the notification date from 03.05.2021 and the state would not have to issue a new notification. The Court further went to postulate that any persons similar to the petitioner could avail of the same, if they furnish a letter of undertaking to an officer designated by the State that the medical equipment would not be put to commercial use. Till the state does not do that, in the interim the importer could give the same undertaking to Joint Secretary, Customs or their nominee can hand over the same to custom officer. The Court also shared that it does not disagree with the State s arguments but the challenges which have arisen are in a unique time period/circumstances, so they are basing their judgement based on how the situation is. The Court also mentioned an order given by Supreme Court Diary No. 10669/2020 passed on 20.03.2020 where SC has taken pains to understand the issues faced by the citizens. The court also mentioned the Small Scale Industrial Manufactures Association Case (both of these cases I don t know) . So in conclusion, the Court holds the imposition of IGST on oxygenator which are imported by individuals as gifts from their relatives as unconstitutional. They also shared that any taxes taken by GOI in above scenario have to be returned. The relief to the state is they will not have to pay interest cost on the same. To check misuse of the same, the petitioner or people who are in similar circumstances would have to give a letter of undertaking to an officer designated by the State within 7 days of the state notifying the patient or anybody authorized by him/her to act on their behalf to share the letter of undertaking with the State. And till the State doesn t provide an officer, the above will continue. Hence, both the writ petition and the pending application are disposed off. The Registry is directed to release any money deposited by the petitioner along with any interest occurred on it (if any) . At the end they record appreciation of Mr. Arvind Datar, Mr. Zoheb Hossain, Mr. Sudhir Nandrajog as well as Mr. Siddharth Bambha. It is only due to their assistance that the court could reach the conclusion it did. For Delhi High Court RAJIV SHAKDHER, J. TALWANT SINGH, J. May 21, 2020 Blogger s Observations Now, after the verdict GOI does have few choices, either accept the verdict or appeal in the SC. A third choice is to make a committee and come to the same conclusions via the committee. GOI has done something similar in the past. If that happens and the same conclusions are reached as before, then the aggrieved may have no choice but to appear in the highest court of law. And this will put the aggrieved at a much more vulnerable place than before as SC court fees, lawyer fees etc. are quite high compared to High Courts. So, there is a possibility that the petitioner may not even approach unless and until some non-profit (NGO) does decide to fight and put it up as common cause or something similar. There is another judgement that I will share, probably tomorrow. Thankfully, that one is pretty short compared to this one. So it should be far more easier to read. FWIW, I did learn about the whole freeenode stuff and many channels who have shifted from freenode to libera. I will share my own experience of the same but that probably will take a day or two.

Zeeshan of IYC (India Youth Congress) along with Salman Khan s non-profit Being Human getting oxygenators

The above picture of Zeeshan. There have been a whole team of Indian Youth Congress workers (main opposition party to the ruling party) who have doing lot of relief effort. They have been buying Oxygenators from abroad with help of Being Human Foundation started by Salman Khan, an actor who works in A-grade movies in Bollywood.

Pandemic Situation in India. I don t know from where I should start. This is probably a good start. I actually would recommend Indiacable as they do attempt to share some things happening in India from day to day but still there is a lot thatt they just can t cover, nobody can cover. There were two reports which kind of shook me all inside. One which sadly came from the UK publication Independent, probably as no Indian publication would dare publish it. The other from Rural India. I have been privileged in many ways, including friends who have asked me if I need any financial help. But seeing reports like above, these people need more help, guidance and help than I. While I m never one to say give to Foundations. If some people do want to help people from Maharashtra, then moneylifefoundation could be a good place where they could donate. FWIW, they usually use the foundation to help savers and investors be safe and help in getting money when taken by companies with dubious intentions. That is their drive. Two articles show their bent. The first one is about the Algo scam which I have written previously about the same in this blog. Interestingly, when I talk about this scam, all Modi supporters are silent. The other one does give some idea as to why the Govt. is indifferent. That is going to a heavy cross for all relatives to bear. There has been a lot that has been happening. Now instead of being limited to cities, Covid has now gone hinterland in a big way. One could ask also Praveen as he probably knows what would be good for Kerala and surrounding areas. The biggest change, however, has been that India is now battling not just the pandemic but also Mucormycosis also known as black fungus and its deadlier cousin the white fungus. Mucormycosis came largely due to an ill-advise given that applying cow dung gives protection to Corona. And many applied it due to faith. And people who know science do know that in fact it has that bacteria. Sadly, those of us who are and were more interested in law, computer science etc. has now also have to keep on top of what is happening in the medical field. It isn t that I hate it, but it has a lot of costs. From what I could gather on various social media and elsewhere, a single injection of anti-fungal for the above costs INR 3k/- and that needs to be 5 times in a day and that course has to be for three weeks. So even the relatively wealthy people can and will become poor in no time. No wonder thousands of those went to UK, US, Dubai or wherever they could find safe-harbor from the pandemic with no plans of arriving back soon. There was also the whole bit about FBS or Fetal Bovin Serum. India ordered millions of blood serum products from abroad and continues to. This was quickly shut down as news on Social Media. Apparently, it is only the Indian cow which is worthy of reverence. All other cows and their children are fair game according to those in power. Of course, that discussion was quickly shut down as was the discussion about IGP (Indian Genome Project). People over the years had asked me why India never participated for the HGP (Human Gnome Project). I actually had no answer for that. Then in 2020, there was idea of IGP which was put up and then it was quickly shot down as the results could damage a political party s image. In fact, a note to people who want to join Indian civil services tells the reason exactly. While many countries in the world are hypocrites, including the U.S. none can take the place that India has made for itself in that field.

The Online experience The vaccination process has been made online and has led to severe heartburn and trouble for many including many memes. For e.g.

Daily work, get up, have a bath, see if you got a slot on the app, sleep.

People trying desperately to get a slot, taken from Hindi Movie Dilwale Dulhania Le Jaygenge.

Just to explain what is happening, one has to go to the website of cowin. Sharing a screenshot of the same.

Cowin app. sceeenshot

I have deliberately taken a screenshot of the cowin app. in U.P. which is one of the areas where the ruling party, BJP has. I haven t taken my state for the simple reason, even if a slot is open, it is of no use as there are no vaccines. As have been shared in India Cable as well as in many newspapers, it is the Central Govt. which holds the strings for the vaccines. Maharashtra did put up an international tender but to no effect. All vaccine manufacturers want only Central Govt. for purchases for multiple reasons. And GOI is saying it has no money even though recently it got loans as well as a dividend from RBI to the tune of 99k crore. For what all that money is, we have no clue. Coming back though, to the issue at hand. the cowin app. is made an open api. While normally, people like us should and are happy when an API is open, it has made those who understand how to use git, compile, etc. better than others. A copy of the public repo. of how you can do the same can be found on Github. Now, obviously, for people like me and many others it has ethical issues.

Kiran s Interview in Times of India (TOI) There isn t much to say apart from I haven t used it. I just didn t want to. It just is unethical. Hopefully, in the coming days GOI does something better. That is the only thing we are surviving on, hope.

The Toolkit saga A few days before, GOI shared a toolkit apparently made by Congress to defame the party in power. That toolkit was shared before the press and Altnews did the investigation and promptly shredded the claims. Congress promptly made an FIR in Chhattisgarh where it is in power. The gentleman who made the claims Mr. Sambit Patra refused to appear against the police without evidence citing personal reasons and asking 1 week to appear before them. Apart from Altnews which did a great job, sadly many people didn t even know that there is something called WYSIWYG. I had to explain that so many Industries, whether it is politics, creative industries, legal, ad industries, medical transcription, and imaging all use this, and all the participants use the same version of the software. The reason being that in most Industries, there is a huge loss and issue of legal liabilities if something untoward happens. For e.g. if medical transcription is done in India is wrong (although his or her work will be checked by a superior in the West), but for whatever reason is not, and a wrong diagnosis is put (due to wrong color or something) then a patient could die and the firm who does that work could face heavy penalties which could be the death of them. There is another myth that Congress has unlimited wealth or huge wealth. I asked if that was the case, why didn t they shift to Mac. Of course, none have answers on this one. There is another reason why they didn t want to appear. The Rona Wilson investigation by Arsenal Experts also has made them cautious. Previously, they had a free run. Nowadays, software forensic tools are available to one and all. For e.g. Debian itself has a good variety of tools for the same. I remember Vipin s sharing few years back. For those who want to start, just install the apps. and try figuring out. Expertise on using the tools takes years though, as you use the tool day in night. Update 25/05/2021 Apparently because Twitter made and showcased few tweets as Manipulated Media , those in Govt. are and were dead against it. So they conducted a raid against Twitter India headquarters, knowing fully well that there would be nobody except security. The moment I read this, my mind went to the whole Fruit of the poisonous tree legal doctrine. Sadly though, India doesn t recognize it and in fact, still believes in the pre-colonial era that evidence however collected is good. A good explanation of the same can be found here. There are some exceptions to the rule, but they are done so fine that more often than not, they can t be used in the court of law in India. Although a good RTI was shared by Mr. Saket Gokhale on the same issue, which does raise some interesting points

Twitter India Raid, Saket Gokhale RTI 1

Saket Gokhale RTI query , Twitter India Raid 2

FWIW, Saket has been successful in getting his prayers heard either as answers to RTI queries or then following it up in the various High Courts of India. Of course, those who are in the ruling party ridicule him but are unable to find faults in his application of logic. And quite a few times, I have learned from his applications as well as nuances or whatever is there in law, a judgment or a guideline which he invokes in his prayer. For e.g. the Lalitha Kumari Guidelines which the gentleman has shared in his prayer can be found here. Hence now, it would be upto the Delhi Police Cell to prove their case in response to RTI. He has also trapped them as he has shared they can t give excuses/exemptions which they have tried before. As I had shared earlier, High Courts in India have woken up, whether it is Delhi, Mumbai, Aurangabad, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha or Kerala. Just today i.e. on 25th May 2021, Justices Bela Trivedi and Justice Kalra had asked how come all the hospitals don t have NOC from the Fire De[partment. They also questioned the ASG (Assistant Solicitor General) as how BU (Building Use Certificate) has been granted as almost all the 400 hospitals are in residential area. To which the ASG replies, it is the same state in almost 4000 schools as well as 6000 odd factories in Ahemdabad alone, leave the rest of the district and state alone. And this is when last year strict instuctions were passed. They chose to do nothing sadly. I will share a link on this when bar and bench gives me The Hindu also shared the whole raid on twitter saga.

Conclusion In conclusion, I sincerely do not where we are headed. The only thing I know is that we cannot expect things to be better before year-end and maybe even after that. It all depends on the vaccines and their availability. After that ruralindia article, I had to see quite a few movies and whatnot just to get that out of my head. And this is apart from the 1600 odd teachers and workers who have died in the U.P. poll duty. Now, what a loss, not just to the family members of the victims, but a whole generation of school children who would not be able to get quality teaching and be deprived of education. What will be their future, God only knows. The only good Bollywood movie which I saw was Ramprasad ki Teravi . The movie was an accurate representation of most families in and around me. There was a movie called Sansar (1987) which showed the breakup of the joint family and into a nuclear family. This movie could very well have been a continuation of the same. Even Marathi movies which at one time were very progressive have gone back to the same boy, girl love story routine. Sameer, though released in late 2020, was able to see it only recently. Vakeel Saab was an ok copy of Pink . I loved Sameer as, unlike Salman Khan films, it showed pretty much an authentic human struggle of a person who goes to the Middle East without any qualifications and works as a laborer and the trials he goes through. Somehow, Malayalam movies have a knack for showing truth without much of budget. Most of the Indian web series didn t make an impact. I think many of them were just going through the motions, it seems as everybody is concerned with the well-being of their near and dear ones. There was also this (Trigger Warning: This story discusses organized campaigns glorifying and advocating sexual violence against Muslim women.) Hoping people somehow make it to the other side of the pandemic.

Host foo.company.com
Port 22
Host *.company.com
Port 10022

Host *.company.com
Port 10022
Host foo.company.com
Port 22

The Population Issue and its many facets Another couple of weeks passed. A Lot of things happening, lots of anger and depression in folks due to handling in pandemic, but instead of blaming they are willing to blame everybody else including the population. Many of them want forced sterilization like what Sanjay Gandhi did during the Emergency (1975). I had to share So Long, My son . A very moving tale of two families of what happened to them during the one-child policy in China. I was so moved by it and couldn t believe that the Chinese censors allowed it to be produced, shot, edited, and then shared worldwide. It also won a couple of awards at the 69th Berlin Film Festival, silver bear for the best actor and the actress in that category. But more than the award, the theme, and the concept as well as the length of the movie which was astonishing. Over a 3 hr. something it paints a moving picture of love, loss, shame, relief, anger, and asking for forgiveness. All of which can be identified by any rational person with feelings worldwide.

Girl child What was also interesting though was what it couldn t or wasn t able to talk about and that is the Chinese leftover men. In fact, a similar situation exists here in India, only it has been suppressed. This has been more pronounced more in Asia than in other places. One big thing in this is human trafficking and mostly women trafficking. For the Chinese male, that was happening on a large scale from all neighboring countries including India. This has been shared in media and everybody knows about it and yet people are silent. But this is not limited to just the Chinese, even Indians have been doing it. Even yesteryear actress Rupa Ganguly was caught red-handed but then later let off after formal questioning as she is from the ruling party. So much for justice. What is and has been surprising at least for me is Rwanda which is in the top 10 of some of the best places in equal gender. It, along with other African countries have also been in news for putting quite a significant amount of percentage of GDP into public healthcare (between 20-10%), but that is a story for a bit later. People forget or want to forget that it was in Satara, a city in my own state where 220 girls changed their name from nakusha or unwanted to something else and that had become a piece of global news. One would think that after so many years, things would have changed, the only change that has happened is that now we have two ministries, The Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) and The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MoHFW). Sadly, in both cases, the ministries have been found wanting, Whether it was the high-profile Hathras case or even the routine cries of help which given by women on the twitter helpline. Sadly, neither of these ministries talks about POSH guidelines which came up after the 2012 gangrape case. For both these ministries, it should have been a pinned tweet. There is also the 1994 PCPNDT Act which although made in 1994, actually functioned in 2006, although what happens underground even today nobody knows . On the global stage, about a decade ago, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt argued in their book Freakonomics how legalized abortion both made the coming population explosion as well as expected crime rates to be reduced. There was a huge pushback on the same from the conservatives and has become a matter of debate, perhaps something that the Conservatives wanted. Interestingly, it hasn t made them go back but go forward as can be seen from the Freakonomics site.

Climate Change Another topic that came up for discussion was repeatedly climate change, but when I share Shell s own 1998 Confidential report titled Greenhouse effect all become strangely silent. The silence here is of two parts, there probably is a large swathe of Indians who haven t read the report and there may be a minority who have read it and know what already has been shared with U.S. Congress. The Conservative s argument has been for it is jobs and a weak we need to research more . There was a partial debunk of it on the TBD podcast by Matt Farell and his brother Sean Farell as to how quickly the energy companies are taking to the coming change.

Health Budget Before going to Covid stories. I first wanted to talk about Health Budgets. From the last 7 years the Center s allocation for health has been between 0.34 to 0.8% per year. That amount barely covers the salaries to the staff, let alone any money for equipment or anything else. And here by allocation I mean, what is actually spent, not the one that is shared by GOI as part of budget proposal. In fact, an article on Wire gives a good breakdown of the numbers. Even those who are on the path of free markets describe India s health business model as a flawed one. See the Bloomberg Quint story on that. Now let me come to Rwanda. Why did I chose Rwanda, I could have chosen South Africa where I went for Debconf 2016, I chose because Rwanda s story is that much more inspiring. In many ways much more inspiring than that South Africa in many ways. Here is a country which for decades had one war or the other, culminating into the Rwanda Civil War which ended in 1994. And coincidentally, they gained independence on a similar timeline as South Africa ending Apartheid in 1994. What does the country do, when it gains its independence, it first puts most of its resources in the healthcare sector. The first few years at 20% of GDP, later than at 10% of GDP till everybody has universal medical coverage. Coming back to the Bloomberg article I shared, the story does not go into the depth of beyond-expiry date medicines, spurious medicines and whatnot. Sadly, most media in India does not cover the deaths happening in rural areas and this I am talking about normal times. Today what is happening in rural areas is just pure madness. For last couple of days have been talking with people who are and have been covering rural areas. In many of those communities, there is vaccine hesitancy and why, because there have been whatsapp forwards sharing that if you go to a hospital you will die and your kidney or some other part of the body will be taken by the doctor. This does two things, it scares people into not going and getting vaccinated, at the same time they are prejudiced against science. This is politics of the lowest kind. And they do it so that they will be forced to go to temples or babas and what not and ask for solutions. And whether they work or not is immaterial, they get fixed and property and money is seized. Sadly, there are not many Indian movies of North which have tried to show it except for oh my god but even here it doesn t go the distance. A much more honest approach was done in Trance . I have never understood how the South Indian movies are able to do a more honest job of story-telling than what is done in Bollywood even though they do in 1/10th the budget that is needed in Bollywood. Although, have to say with OTT, some baggage has been shed but with the whole film certification rearing its ugly head through MEITY orders, it seems two steps backward instead of forward. The idea being simply to infantilize the citizens even more. That is a whole different ball-game which probably will require its own space.

Vaccine issues One good news though is that Vaccination has started. But it has been a long story full of greed by none other than GOI (Government of India) or the ruling party BJP. Where should I start with. I probably should start with this excellent article done by Priyanka Pulla. It is interesting and fascinating to know how vaccines are made, at least one way which she shared. She also shared about the Cutter Incident which happened in the late 50 s. The response was on expected lines, character assassination of her and the newspaper they published but could not critique any of the points made by her. Not a single point that she didn t think about x or y. Interestingly enough, in January 2021 Bharati Biotech was supposed to be share phase 3 trial data but hasn t been put up in public domain till May 2021. In fact, there have been a few threads raised by both well-meaning Indians as well as others globally especially on twitter to which GOI/ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) is silent. Another interesting point to note is that Russia did say in its press release that it is possible that their vaccine may not be standard (read inactivation on their vaccines and another way is possible but would take time, again Brazil has objected, but India hasn t till date.) What also has been interesting is the homegrown B.1.617 lineage or known as double mutant . This was first discovered from my own state, Maharashtra and then transported around the world. There is also B.1.618 which was found in West Bengal and is same or supposed to be similar to the one found in South Africa. This one is known as Triple mutant . About B.1.618 we don t know much other than knowing that it is much more easily transferable, much more infectious. Most countries have banned flights from India and I cannot fault them anyway. Hell, when even our diplomats do not care for procedures to be followed during the pandemic then how a common man is supposed to do. Of course, now for next month, Mr. Modi was supposed to go and now will not attend the G7 meeting. Whether, it is because he would have to face the press (the only Prime Minister and the only Indian Prime Minister who never has faced free press.) or because the Indian delegation has been disinvited, we would never know.

A good article which shares lots of lows with how things have been done in India has been an article by Arundhati Roy. And while the article in itself is excellent and shares a bit of the bitter truth but is still incomplete as so much has been happening. The problem is that the issue manifests in so many ways, it is difficult to hold on. As Arundhati shared, should we just look at figures and numbers and hold on, or should we look at individual ones, for e.g. the one shared in Outlook India. Or the one shared by Dr. Dipshika Ghosh who works in Covid ICU in some hospital

Dr. Dipika Ghosh sharing an incident in Covid Ward

Interestingly as well, while in the vaccine issue, Brazil Anvisa doesn t know what they are doing or the regulator just isn t knowledgeable etc. (statements by various people in GOI, when it comes to testing kits, the same is an approver.)

ICMR/DGCI approving internationally validated kits, Press release.

Twitter In the midst of all this, one thing that many people have forgotten and seem to have forgotten that Twitter and other tools are used by only the elite. The reason why the whole thing has become serious now than in the first phase is because the elite of India have also fallen sick and dying which was not the case so much in the first phase. The population on Twitter is estimated to be around 30-34 million and people who are everyday around 20 odd million or so, which is what 2% of the Indian population which is estimated to be around 1.34 billion. The other 98% don t even know that there is something like twitter on which you can ask help. Twitter itself is exclusionary in many ways, with both the emoticons, the language and all sorts of things. There is a small subset who does use Twitter in regional languages, but they are too small to write anything about. The main language is English which does become a hindrance to lot of people.

Censorship Censorship of Indians critical of Govt. mishandling has been non-stop. Even U.S. which usually doesn t interfere into India s internal politics was forced to make an exception. But of course, this has been on deaf ears. There is and was a good thread on Twitter by Gaurav Sabnis, a friend, fellow Puneite now settled in U.S. as a professor.

Gaurav on Trump-Biden on vaccination of their own citizens

Now just to surmise what has been happened in India and what has been happening in most of the countries around the world. Most of the countries have done centralization purchasing of the vaccine and then is distributed by the States, this is what we understand as co-operative federalism. While last year, GOI took a lot of money under the shady PM Cares fund for vaccine purchase, donations from well-meaning Indians as well as Industries and trade bodies. Then later, GOI said it would leave the states hanging and it is they who would have to buy vaccines from the manufacturers. This is again cheap politics. The idea behind it is simple, GOI knows that almost all the states are strapped for cash. This is not new news, this I have shared a couple of months back. The problem has been that for the last 6-8 months no GST meeting has taken place as shared by Punjab s Finance Minister Amarinder Singh. What will happen is that all the states will fight in-between themselves for the vaccine and most of them are now non-BJP Governments. The idea is let the states fight and somehow be on top. So, the pandemic, instead of being a public health issue has become something of on which politics has to played. The news on whatsapp by RW media is it s ok even if a million or two also die, as it is India is heavily populated. Although that argument vanishes for those who lose their dear and near ones. But that just isn t the issue, the issue goes much more deeper than that Oxygen:12%
Remedisivir:12%
Sanitiser:12%
Ventilator:12%
PPE:18%
Ambulances 28% Now all the products above are essential medical equipment and should be declared as essential medical equipment and should have price controls on which GST is levied. In times of pandemic, should the center be profiting on those. States want to let go and even want the center to let go so that some relief is there to the public, while at the same time make them as essential medical equipment with price controls. But GOI doesn t want to. Leaders of opposition parties wrote open letters but no effect. What is sad to me is how Ambulances are being taxed at 28%. Are they luxury items or sin goods ? This also reminds of the recent discovery shared by Mr. Pappu Yadav in Bihar. You can see the color of ambulances as shared by Mr. Yadav, and the same news being shared by India TV news showing other ambulances. Also, the weak argument being made of not having enough drivers. Ideally, you should have 2-3 people, both 9-1-1 and Chicago Fire show 2 people in ambulance but a few times they have also shown to be flipped over. European seems to have three people in ambulance, also they are also much more disciplined as drivers, at least an opinion shared by an American expat.

Pappu Yadav, President Jan Adhikar Party, Bihar May 11, 2021

What is also interesting to note is GOI plays this game of Health is State subject and health is Central subject depending on its convenience. Last year, when it invoked the Epidemic and DMA Act it was a Central subject, now when bodies are flowing down the Ganges and pyres being lit everywhere, it becomes a State subject. But when and where money is involved, it again becomes a Central subject. The States are also understanding it, but they are fighting on too many fronts.

Snippets from Karnataka High Court hearing today, 13th March 2021

One of the good things is most of the High Courts have woken up. Many of the people on the RW think that the Courts are doing Judicial activism . And while there may be an iota of truth in it, the bitter truth is that many judges or relatives or their helpers have diagnosed and some have even died due to Covid. In face of the inevitable, what can they do. They are hauling up local Governments to make sure they are accountable while at the same time making sure that they get access to medical facilities. And I as a citizen don t see any wrong in that even if they are doing it for selfish reasons. Because, even if justice is being done for selfish reasons, if it does improve medical delivery systems for the masses, it is cool. If it means that the poor and everybody else are able to get vaccinations, oxygen and whatever they need, it is cool. Of course, we are still seeing reports of patients spending in the region of INR 50k and more for each day spent in hospital. But as there are no price controls, judges cannot do anything unless they want to make an enemy of the medical lobby in the country. A good story on medicines and what happens in rural areas, see no further than Laakhon mein ek.

Allahabad High Court hauling Uttar Pradesh Govt. for lack of Oxygen is equal to genocide, May 11, 2021

The censorship is not just related to takedown requests on twitter but nowadays also any articles which are critical of the GOI s handling. I have been seeing many articles which have shared facts and have been critical of GOI being taken down. Previously, we used to see 404 errors happen 7-10 years down the line and that was reasonable. Now we see that happen, days weeks or months. India seems to be turning more into China and North Korea and become more anti-science day-by-day

Fake websites Before going into fake websites, let me start with a fake newspaper which was started by none other than the Gujarat CM Mr. Modi in 2005 .

Gujarat Satya Samachar 2005 launched by Mr. Modi.

And if this wasn t enough than on Feb 8, 2005, he had invoked Official Secrets Act

Mr. Modi invoking Official Secrets Act, Feb 8 2005 Gujarat Samachar

The headlines were In Modi s regime press freedom is in peril-Down with Modi s dictatorship. So this was a tried and tested technique. The above information was shared by Mr. Urvish Kothari, who incidentally also has his own youtube channel. Now cut to 2021, and we have a slew of fake websites being done by the same party. In fact, it seems they started this right from 2011. A good article on BBC itself tells the story. Hell, Disinfo.eu which basically combats disinformation in EU has a whole pdf chronicling how BJP has been doing it. Some of the sites it shared are

Times of New York
Manchester Times
Times of Los Angeles
Manhattan Post
Washington Herald
and many more. The idea being take any site name which sounds similar to a brand name recognized by Indians and make fool of them. Of course, those of who use whois and other such tools can easily know what is happening. Two more were added to the list yesterday, Daily Guardian and Australia Today. There are of course, many features which tell them apart from genuine websites. Most of these are on shared hosting rather than dedicated hosting, most of these are bought either from Godaddy and Bluehost. While Bluehost used to be a class act once upon a time, both the above will do anything as long as they get money. Don t care whether it s a fake website or true. Capitalism at its finest or worst depending upon how you look at it. But most of these details are lost on people who do not know web servers, at all and instead think see it is from an exotic site, a foreign site and it chooses to have same ideas as me. Those who are corrupt or see politics as a tool to win at any cost will not see it as evil. And as a gentleman Raghav shared with me, it is so easy to fool us. An example he shared which I had forgotten. Peter England which used to be an Irish brand was bought by Aditya Birla group way back in 2000. But even today, when you go for Peter England, the way the packaging is done, the way the prices are, more often than not, people believe they are buying the Irish brand. While sharing this, there is so much of Naom Chomsky which comes to my mind again and again

Caste Issues I had written about caste issues a few times on this blog. This again came to the fore as news came that a Hindu sect used forced labor from Dalit community to make a temple. This was also shared by the hill. In both, Mr. Joshi doesn t tell that if they were volunteers then why their passports have been taken forcibly, also I looked at both minimum wage prevailing in New Jersey as a state as well as wage given to those who are in the construction Industry. Even in minimum wage, they were giving $1 when the prevailing minimum wage for unskilled work is $12.00 and as Mr. Joshi shared that they are specialized artisans, then they should be paid between $23 $30 per hour. If this isn t exploitation, then I don t know what is. And this is not the first instance, the first instance was perhaps the case against Cisco which was done by John Doe. While I had been busy with other things, it seems Cisco had put up both a demurrer petition and a petition to strike which the Court stayed. This seemed to all over again a type of apartheid practice, only this time applied to caste. The good thing is that the court stayed the petition. Dr. Ambedkar s statement if Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem given at Columbia University in 1916, seems to be proven right in today s time and sadly has aged well. But this is not just something which is there only in U.S. this is there in India even today, just couple of days back, a popular actress Munmun Dutta used a casteist slur and then later apologized giving the excuse that she didn t know Hindi. And this is patently false as she has been in the Bollywood industry for almost now 16-17 years. This again, was not an isolated incident. Seema Singh, a lecturer in IIT-Kharagpur abused students from SC, ST backgrounds and was later suspended. There is an SC/ST Atrocities Act but that has been diluted by this Govt. A bit on the background of Dr. Ambedkar can be found at a blog on Columbia website. As I have shared and asked before, how do we think, for what reason the Age of Englightenment or the Age of Reason happened. If I were a fat monk or a priest who was privileges, would I have let Age of Enlightenment happen. It broke religion or rather Church which was most powerful to not so powerful and that power was more distributed among all sort of thinkers, philosophers, tinkers, inventors and so on and so forth.

Situation going forward I believe things are going to be far more complex and deadly before they get better. I had to share another term called Comorbidities which fortunately or unfortunately has also become part of twitter lexicon. While I have shared what it means, it simply means when you have an existing ailment or condition and then Coronavirus attacks you. The Virus will weaken you. The Vaccine in the best case just stops the damage, but the damage already done can t be reversed. There are people who advise and people who are taking steroids but that again has its own side-effects. And this is now, when we are in summer. I am afraid for those who have recovered, what will happen to them during the Monsoons. We know that the Virus attacks most the lungs and their quality of life will be affected. Even the immune system may have issues. We also know about the inflammation. And the grant that has been given to University of Dundee also has signs of worry, both for people like me (obese) as well as those who have heart issues already. In other news, my city which has been under partial lockdown since a month, has been extended for another couple of weeks. There are rumors that the same may continue till the year-end even if it means economics goes out of the window.There is possibility that in the next few months something like 2 million odd Indians could die

The above is a conversation between Karan Thapar and an Oxford Mathematician Dr. Murad Banaji who has shared that the under-counting of cases in India is huge. Even BBC shared an article on the scope of under-counting. Of course, those on the RW call of the evidence including the deaths and obituaries in newspapers as a narrative . And when asked that when deaths used to be in the 20 s or 30 s which has jumped to 200-300 deaths and this is just the middle class and above. The poor don t have the money to get wood and that is the reason you are seeing the bodies in Ganges whether in Buxar Bihar or Gajipur, Uttar Pradesh. The sights and visuals makes for sorry reading

Pandit Ranjan Mishra son on his father s death due to unavailability of oxygen, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 11th May 2021.

For those who don t know Pandit Ranjan Mishra was a renowned classical singer. More importantly, he was the first person to suggest Mr. Modi s name as a Prime Ministerial Candidate. If they couldn t fulfil his oxygen needs, then what can be expected for the normal public.

Conclusion Sadly, this time I have no humorous piece to share, I can however share a documentary which was shared on Feluda . I have shared about Feluda or Prodosh Chandra Mitter a few times on this blog. He has been the answer of James Bond from India. I have shared previously about The Golden Fortress . An amazing piece of art by Satyajit Ray. I watched that documentary two-three times. I thought, mistakenly that I am the only fool or fan of Feluda in Pune to find out that there are people who are even more than me. There were so many facets both about Feluda and master craftsman Satyajit Ray that I was unaware about. I was just simply amazed. I even shared few of the tidbits with mum as well, although now she has been truly hooked to Korean dramas. The only solace from all the surrounding madness. So, if you have nothing to do, you can look up his books, read them and then see the movies. And my first recommendation would be the Golden Fortress. The only thing I would say, do not have high hopes. The movie is beautiful. It starts slow and then picks up speed, just like a train. So, till later. Update The Mass surveillance part I could not do justice do hence removed it at the last moment. It actually needs its whole space, article. There is so much that the Govt. is doing under the guise of the pandemic that it is difficult to share it all in one article. As it is, the article is big