The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Abraham Raji (abraham)
• Phil Morrell (emorrp1)
• Anupa Ann Joseph (anupa)
• Mathias Gibbens (gibmat)
• Arun Kumar Pariyar (arun)
• Tino Didriksen (tinodidriksen)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Gavin Lai
• Martin Dosch
• Taavi V n nen
• Daichi Fukui
• Daniel Gr ber
• Vivek K J
• William Wilson
• Ruben Pollan

Congratulations!

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

India, leader in Internet shutdowns Access Now (copyright)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Formal sector issues Just today it was published that output from eight formal sectors of the economy who make the bulk of the Indian economy were down on a month to month basis . This means all those apologists for the Government who said that it was ok that the Govt. didn t give the 20 lakh crore package which was announced. In fact, a businessman from my own city, a certain Prafull Sarda had asked via RTI what happened to the 20 lakh crore package which was announced? The answers were in all media as well as newspapers but on the inside pages. You can see one of the article sharing the details here. No wonder Vivek Kaul also shared his take on the way things will hopefully go for the next quarter which seems to be a tad optimistic from where we are atm.

Eight Sectors declining in Indian Economy month-on-month CNBC TV 18

The Informal economy The informal economy has been strangulated by the current party in power since it came into power. And this has resulted many small businesses which informal are and were part of culture of cities and towns. I share an article from 2018 which only shows how good and on the mark it has aged in the last two years. The damage is all to real to ignore as I would share more of an anecdotes and experiences because sadly there never has been any interest shown especially by GOI to seek any stats. about informal economy. Although CMIE has done some good work in that even though they majorly look at formal, usually blue-collar work where again there is not good data. Sharing an anecdote and a learning from these small businesses which probably an MBA guy wouldn t know and in all honesty wouldn t even care. Khau galli Few years back, circa 2014 and on wards, when the present Govt. came into power, it did come with lot of promises. One of which was that lot of informal businesses would be encouraged to grow their businesses and in time hopefully, they become part of the formal economy. Or at least that was the story that all of us were told. Due to that they did lot of promises and also named quite a few places where street food was in abundance. Such lanes were named Khau galli for those who are from North India, it was be easily known and understood. This was just saying that here are some places where you could get a variety of food without paying obscene prices as you would have to vis-a-vis a restaurant. Slowly, they raised the rates of inputs (food grains), gas cylinder etc. which we know of as food inflation and via GST made sure that the restaurants were able to absorb some of the increased inputs (input credit) while still being more than competitive to the street food person/s. The restaurant F&B model is pretty well known so not going there at all. It is however, important to point out that they didn t make any new khau gallis or such, most or all the places existed for years and even decades before that. They also didn t take any extra effort either in marketing the khau gallis or get them with chefs or marketing folks so that the traditional can marry to the anew. They just named them, that was the only gain to be seen on the ground. In its heyday, the khau galli near my home used to have anywhere between 20-30 Thelas or food carts. Most of the food carts would be of wood and having very limited steel. Such food carts would cost anywhere around INR 15-20k instead of the food cart you see here. The only reason I shared that link is to show how a somewhat typical thela or food cart looks in India. Of course YouTube or any other media platform would show many. On top of it, you need and needed permission from the municipality a license for the same which would be auctioned. Now that license could well run from thousands into lakhs depending on various factors or you gave something to the Municipal worker when he did his rounds/beat much like a constable every day or week. Apart from those, you also have raw material expenditure which could easily run into few thousands depending upon what sort of food you are vending. You also would typically have 2-3 workers so a typical Thela would feed not only its customers but also 2-3 families who are the laborer families as well as surrounding businesses. As I used to be loyal and usually go to few whom I found to be either tasty or somehow they were good for me. In either case, a relationship was formed. As I have been never fond of crowds, I usually used to in their off-beat hours either when they are close to packing up of when I know they usually have a lull. That way I knew I would get complete attention of the vendor/s. Many a times I used to see money change hands between the vendors themselves and used to see both camaraderie as well as competition between them. This is years ago, once while sharing a chai (tea) with one of the street vendors I casually asked I have often seen you guys exchanging money with each other and most of the time quite a bit of the money is also given to the guy who didn t make that much sales or any sales at all. The vendor replied sharing practical symbiotic knowledge. All of us are bound by a single thing called poverty. All of us are struggle. Do you know why so many people come here, because they know that there would be a variety of food to be had. Now if we stopped helping each other, the number of people who would make the effort would be also less, we know we are not the only game in town. Also whatever we give, sooner or later it gets adjusted. Also if one of us has good days, he knows hardship days are not far. Why, simply because people change tastes or want variety. So irrespective of good or bad the skills of the vendor is, she or he is bound to make some sales. The vendor either shares the food with us or whatever. Somehow these things just work out. And that doesn t mean we don t have our fights, we do have our fights, but we also understand this. Now you see this and you understand that these guys have and had a community. Even if they changed places due to one reason or the other, they kept themselves connected. Unlike many of us, who even find a hard time keeping up with friends let alone relatives. Now cut to 2020, and where there used to be 20-30 thelas near my home, there are only 4-5. Of course, multiple reasons, but one of the biggest was of course demonetization. That was a huge shock to which many of thela walas succumbed. Their entire savings and capital were turned to dust. Many of their customers will turn up with either a INR 500 or INR 2000/- Re note where at the most a dish costed INR 100/- most times half or even 1/3rd of that amount. How and from where the thela walas could get that kind of cash. These are people who only if they earn, they and their family will have bread at night. Most of the loose change was tied up at middle to higher tier restaurants where they were giving between INR 20/- 30/- for every INR 100/- change of rupees and coins. Quite a few bankers made money by that as well as other means where the thela walas just could not compete. These guys also didn t have any black money even though they were and are part of the black/informal economy. Sadly, till date no economist or even sociologist as far as I know has attempted or done any work from what I know on this industry. If you want to formalize such businesses then at the very least understand their problems and devise solutions. And I suspect, what is and has happened near my house has also happened everywhere else, at least within the geographical confines of the Indian state. Whether it was the 2016 demonetization or the pandemic, the results and effects have been similar the same all over. Some states did do well and still do, the suffering still continues. With the hope that the new year brings cheer to you as well some more ideas to remain in business by the thela walas, I bid you adieu and see you in new year

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

Procurement of Rice by Various States

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

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

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

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

Statistica Chart of differences between Republicans and Democrats

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

PTI News, Nov 27, 2020

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

I was gonna use this blog post to share about the migrant worker woes as there has been multiple stories doing the rounds. For e.g. a story which caught the idea of few people but most of us, i.e. middle-class people are so much into our own thing that we care a fig leaf about what happens to migrants. This should not be a story coming from a humane society but it seems India is no different than any other country of the world and in not a good way. Allow me to share Or for those who don t like youtube, here s an alternative link https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=JGEgZq_1jmc Now the above two editorial shares two stories, one of Trump retaliatory threat to India in the Q&A of the journalist. In fact, Trump has upped the ante on visa sanctions as India buckled so easily under pressure. There have been other stories doing the rounds how people who have illnesses who need HCQ in India are either dying or are close to death because of unavailability of HCQ in the medicine shop. There have been reports in Pune as well as South Mumbai (one of the poshest localities in Mumbai/Bombay) that medicine shops are running empty or emptier. There have been so many stories on that, with reporters going to shops and asking owners of the medicine shops and shop-owners being clueless. I think the best article which vividly describes the Government of India (GOI) response to the pandemic is the free-to-read article shared by Arundhati Roy in Financial Times. It has reduced so much of my work or sharing that it s unbelievable. And she has shared it with pictures and all so I can share other aspects of how the pandemic has been affecting India and bringing the worst out in the Government in its our of need. In fact, not surprisingly though, apparently there was also a pro-Israel similar thing which happened in Africa too . As India has too few friends now globally, hence it decided to give a free pass to them.

Government of India, news agencies and paid News One of the attempts the state tried to do, although very late IMHO is that it tried to reach out to the opposition i.e. Congress party and the others. Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, who is the Congress president asked that the Government should not run any of its ads on private television channels for a period of two years. There had been plenty of articles, both by medianama and others who have alleged that at least from the last 6 odd years, Government ads. comprise of almost 50-60% advertising budget of a channel advertising budget. This has been discussed also in medianama s roundtable on online content which happened few months back. While an edited version is out there on YT, this was full two day s event which happened across two different cities.

or the alternative to youtube https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=c1PhWR1-Urs It was as if the roundtable discussions were not enough, Mrs. Gandhi clarion call was answered by News Broadcaster s Association (NBA) and this is what they had to say

News Broadcasters Association reply to Mrs. Gandhi

To put it simply, NBA deplored the suggestion by Mrs. Gandhi and even called the economy in recession and all they had were the Government s own advertising budget to justify their existence. The statements in themselves are highly pregnant and reveal both the relationship that the media, print or mainstream news channels have with the Government of India. Now if you see that, doesn t it make sense that media always slants the story from the Government s perspective rather than remaining neutral. If my bread basket were on the onus of me siding with the Govt. that is what most sane persons would do, otherwise they would resign and leave which many reporters who had a conscience did. Interestingly enough, the NBA statement didn t just end there but also used the word recession , this is the term that Government of India (GOI) hates and has in turn has been maintaining the word, terminology slowdown . While from a layman s perspective the two terms may seem to be similar, if India has indeed been in recession then the tools and the decisions that should have been taken by GOI should have been much different than what they took. Interestingly, enough GOI has refrained from saying anything on the matter which only reveals their own interests in the matter. Also if an association head is making the statement, it is more than likely that he consulted a lawyer or two and used application of mind while drafting the response. In other words, or put more simply, this was a very carefully drafted letter because they know that tomorrow the opposition party may come into power so they don t want to upset the power dynamics too much.

Privacy issues arising due to the Pandemic On the same Financial Times, two stories which dealt with the possible privacy violations due to the Pandemic have been doing the rounds. The first one, by Yuval Noah Harari is more exploratory by nature and makes some very good points without going far too deep into specific instances of recent times but rather goes into history and past instances where Governments have used the pandemics to exert more control over their populace and drive their agenda. I especially liked the last few lines which he shared in his op-ed Even if the current administration eventually changes tack and comes up with a global plan of action, few would follow a leader who never takes responsibility, who never admits mistakes, and who routinely takes all the credit for himself while leaving all the blame to others. Yuval Noah Harari . The whole statement could right fit onto the American President which he was talking about while at the same time, fits right into the current Indian Prime Minister, Boris Johnson of UK and perhaps Jair Bolsanaro of Brazil. All these three-four individuals have in common is that most of them belong to right-wing and hence cater only to the rich industrialist s agenda. While I don t know about Jair Bolsanaro much, at least three out of four had to turn to socialism and had to give some bailout packages to the public at large, even though continuing to undermine their own actions. More on this probably a bit down the line. The second story shared by Nic Fildes and Javier Espinoza who broke the story of various surveillance attempts and the privacy concerns that people have. Even the Indian PMO has asked this data and because there was no protest by the civil society, a token protest was done by COAI (Cellular Operator Association of India) but beyond that nothing, I am guessing because the civil society didn t make much noise as everybody is busy with their own concerns of safety and things going on, it s possible that such data may have gone to the Government. There is not much new here that people who had been working on the privacy issues know, it s just how easy Governments are finding to do it. The part of informed consent is really a misnomer . Governments lie all the time, for e.g. in the UK, did the leave party and people take informed consent, no they pushed their own agenda. This is and will be similar in many countries of the world.

False Socialism by RW parties In at least the three countries I have observing, simply due to available time, that lot of false promises are being made by our leaders and more often than not, the bailouts will be given to already rich industrialists. An op-ed by Vivek Kaul, who initially went by his handle which means somebody who is educated but unemployed. While Vivek has been one-man army in revealing most of the Government s mischiefs especially as fudging numbers are concerned among other things, there have been others too. As far as the US is concerned, an e-zine called free press (literally) has been sharing Trump s hollowness and proclamations for U.S. . Far more interestingly, I found New York times investigated and found a cache of e-mails starting from early January, which they are calling Red Dawn . The cache is undeniable proof that medical personnel in the U.S. were very much concerned since January 2020 but it was only after other countries started lock-down that U.S. had to follow suit. I am sure Indian medical professionals may have done similar mail exchanges but we will never know as the Indian media isn t independent enough.

Domestic violence and Patriarchy There have been numerous reports of domestic violence against women going up, in fact two prominent publications have shared pieces about how domestic violence has gone up in India since the lockdown but the mainstream press is busy with its own tropes, the reasons already stated above. In fact, interestingly enough, most women can t wear loose fitting clothes inside the house because of the near ones being there 24 7 . This was being shared as India is going through summer where heat waves are common and most families do not have access to A/C s and rely on either a fan or just ventilation to help them out. I can t write more about this as simply I m not a woman so I haven t had to face the pressures that they have to every day. Interestingly though, there was a piece shared by arre. Interestingly, also arre whose content I have shared a few times on my blog has gone from light, funny to be much darker and more serious tone. Whether this is due to the times we live in is something that a social scientist or a social anthropologist may look into in the times to come. One of the good things though, there hasn t been any grid failures as no industrial activity is happening (at all). In fact SEB s (State Electricity Boards) has shown a de-growth in electricity uptake as no industrial activity has been taken. While they haven t reduced any prices (which they ideally should have) as everybody is suffering.

Loot and price rise Again, don t think it is an Indian issue but perhaps may be the same globally. Because of broken supply chains, there are both real and artificial shortages happening which is leading to reasonable and unreasonable price hikes in the market. Fresh veggies which were normally between INR 10/- to INR 20/- for 250 gm have reached INR 40/- 50/- and even above. Many of the things that we have to become depend upon are not there anymore. The shortage of plastic bottles being case in point.

Aryan Plastic bottle

This and many others like these pictures have been shared on social media but it seems the Government is busy doing something else. The only thing we know for sure is that the lock-down period is only gonna increase, no word about PPE s (Personal Protection Equipment) or face masks or anything else. While India has ordered some, those orders are being diverted to US or EU. In fact, many doctors who have asked for the same have been arrested, sacked or suspended for asking such inconvenient questions, although whether in BJP ruled states or otherwise. In fact, the Centre has suspended MPLADS funds , members of parliament get funds which they can use to provide relief work or whatever they think the money is best to spend upon.

Conditions of Labor in the Pandemic Another sort of depressing story has been how the Supreme Court CJI Justice SA Bobde has made statements and refrained from playing any role in directing the Center to provide relief to the daily wage laborers. In fact, Mr. Bobde made statements such as why they need salaries if they are getting food. This was shared by barandbench, a site curated by lawyers and reporters alike. Both livelaw as well as barandbench have worked to enhance people s awareness about the legal happenings in our High Courts and Supreme Court. And while sadly, they cannot cover all, they at least do attempt to cover a bit of what s hot atm. The Chief Justice who draws a salary of INR 250,000 per month besides other perks is perhaps unaware or doesn t care about fate of millions of casual workers, 400 460 million workers who will face abject poverty and by extension even if there are 4 members of the family so probably 1.2 billion people will fall below the poverty line. Three, four major sectors are going to be severely impacted, namely Agriculture, Construction and then MSME (Micro, small and medium enterprises) which cover everything from autos, industrial components, FMCG, electronics, you name it, it s done by the MSME sector. We know that the Rabi crop, even though it was gonna be a bumper crop this year will rot away in the fields. Even the Kharif crop whose window for sowing is at the most 2-3 weeks will not be able to get it done in time. In fact, with the extended lockdown of another 21 days, people will probably return home after 2 months by which time they would have nothing to do there as well as here in the cities. Another good report was done by the wire, the mainstream media has already left the station.

Ministry of Public Health There was an article penned by Dr. Edmond Fernandes which he published last year. The low salary along with the complexities that Indian doctors are and may face in the near future are just mind-boggling.

The Loss Losses have already started pouring in. Just today Air Deccan has ceased all its operations. I had loved Mr. Gopinath s airline which was started in the early 2000 s. While I won t bore you with the history, most of it can be seen from simplify Deccan . This I believe is just the start and it s only after the few months after the lock-down has been lifted would we really know the true extent of losses everywhere. And the more lenghthier the lockdown, the more difficult it would be businesses to ramp back. People have already diagnosed at the very least 15-20 sectors of the economy which would be hit and another similar or more number of sectors which will have first and second-order of losses and ramp-downs. While some guesses are being made, many are wildly optimistic and many are wildly pessimistic, as shared we would only know the results when the lockdown is opened up.

Predictions for the future While things are very much in the air, some predictions can be made or rationally deduced. For instance, investments made in automation and IT would remain and perhaps even accelerate a little. Logistics models would need to be re-worked and maybe, just maybe there would be talk and action in making local supply chains a bit more robust. Financing is going to be a huge issue for at least 6 months to a year. Infrastructure projects which require huge amount of cash upfront will either have to be re-worked or delayed, how they will affect projects like Pune Metro and other such projects only time will tell.

Raghuram Rajan Raghuram Rajan was recently asked if he would come back and let bygones be bygones. Raghuram in his own roundabout way said no. He is right now with Chicago Booth doing the work that he always love. Why would he leave that and be right in the middle of the messes other people have made. He probably gets more money, more freedom and probably has a class full of potential future economists. Immigration Control, Conferences and thought experiment There are so many clueless people out there, who don t know why it takes so long for any visa to be processed. From what little I know, it is to verify who you say you are and you have valid reason to enter the country. The people from home ministry verify credentials, as well as probably check with lists of known criminals and their networks world-wide. They probably have programs for such scenarios and are part and parcel of their everyday work. The same applies to immigration control at Airports. there has been a huge gap at immigration counters and the numbers of passengers who were flying internationally to and fro from India. While in India, we call them as Ministry of Home Affairs, in U.S. it s Department of Homeland security, other countries using similar jargons. Now even before this pandemic happened, the number of people who are supposed to do border control and check people was way less and there have been scenes of Air rage especially in Indian airports after people came after a long-distance flight. Now there are couple of thought experiments, just day before yesterday scientists discovered six new coronaviruses in bats and scientists in Iceland found 40 odd mutations of the virus on people. Now are countries going to ban people from Iceland as in time the icelandic people probably would have anti-bodies on all the forty odd mutations. Now if and when they come in contact onto others who have not, what would happen ? And this is not specifically about one space or ethnicity or whatever, microbes and viruses have been longer on earth than we have. In our greed we have made viruses resistant to antibiotics. While Mr. Trump says as he discovered it today, this has been known to the medical fraternity since tht 1950 s. CDC s own chart shows it. We cannot live in fear of a virus, the only way we can beat it is by understanding it and using science. Jon Cohen shared some of the incredible ways science is looking to beat this thing

or as again an alternative to youtube https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=MPVG_n3w_vM One of the most troubling question is how the differently-abled communities which don t have media coverage at the best of times, haven t had any media coverage at all during the pandemic. What are their stories and what they are experiencing ? How are they coping ? Are there anyways we could help each other ? By not having those stories, we perhaps have left them more vulnerable than we intend. And what does that speak about us, as people or as a community or a society ?

Silver Linings While there is not a lot to be positive about, one interesting project I came about is openbreath.tech . This is an idea, venture started by IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) , IUCAA (Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics). They are collaborating with octogeneraian Capt (Retd) Rustom Barucha from Barucha Instrumentation and Control, besides IndoGenius, New Delhi, and King s College, London. The first two institutes are from my home town, Pune. While I don t know much of the specifics of this idea other than that there is an existing Barucha ventilator which they hope to open-source and make it easier for people to produce their own. While I have more questions than answers at this point, this is something hopefully to watch out for in the coming days and weeks. The other jolly bit of good news has come from Punjab where after several decades, people in Northern Punjab are finally able to see the Himalayas or the Himalayan mountain range.

Dhauladhar range Northern Punjab Copyright CNN.Com

There you have it, What I have covered is barely scratching the surface. As a large section of the media only focuses on one narrative, other stories and narratives are lost. Be safe, till later.

There has been a great deal of comment among my friends recently about a particularly British cookery program called "The Great British Bake Off". There has been some controversy as the program is moving from the BBC to a commercial broadcaster.

Part of this discussion comes from all the presenters, excepting Paul Hollywood, declining to sign with the new broadcaster and partly because of speculation the BBC might continue with a similar format show with a new name.

Rob Kendrick provided the start to this conversation by passing on a satirical link suggesting Samuel L Jackson might host "cakes on a plane"

This caused a large number of suggestions for alternate names which I will be reporting but Rob Kendrick, Vivek Das Mohapatra, Colin Watson, Jonathan McDowell, Oki Kuma, Dan Alderman, Dagfinn Ilmari Manns ke, Lesley Mitchell and Daniel Silverstone are the ones to blame.

• Strictly come baking
• Stars and their pies
• Baking with the stars
• Bake/Off.
• Blind Cake
• Cake or no cake?
• The cake is a lie
• Bake That.
• Bake Me On
• Bake On Me
• Bakin' Stevens.
• The Winner Bakes It All
• Bakerloo
• Bake Five
• Every breath you bake
• Every bread you bake
• Unbake my heart
• Knead and let prove
• Bake me up before you go-go
• I want to bake free
• Another bake bites the dust
• Cinnamon whorl is not enough
• The pie who loved me
• The yeast you can do.
• Total collapse of the tart
• Bake and deliver
• You Gotta Bake
• Bake's Seven
• Natural Born Bakers
• Bake It Or Leaven It
• Driving the last pikelet
• Pie crust on the dancefloor
• Tomorrow never pies
• Murder on the pie crust
• The pie who came in from the cold.
• You only bake twice (Every body has to make one sweet and one savoury dish).

So that is our list, anyone else got better ideas?

A friend recently commented on my rather unusual portrait on my (out of date) page on the Berkman website. Here s the story. I joined Berkman as a fellow with a fantastic class of fellows that included, among many other incredibly accomplished people, Vivek Kundra: first Chief Information Officer of the United States. At Berkman, all the fellows are all asked for photos and Vivek apparently sent in his official government portrait. You are probably familiar with the genre. In the US at least, official government portraits are mostly pictures of men in dark suits, light shirts, and red or blue ties with flags draped blurrily in the background. Not unaware of the fact that Vivek sat right below me on the alphabetically sorted Berkman fellows page, a small group that included Paul Tagliamonte very familiar with the genre from his work with government photos in Open States decided to create a government portrait of me using the only flag we had on hand late one night. The result shown in the screenshot above and in the WayBack Machine was almost entirely unnoticed (at least to my knowledge) but was hopefully appreciated by those who did see it.

In my professional life I am sometimes required to provide technical support to one of our salesmen. I find this an interesting change in pace though sometimes challenging.

Occasionally I fail to clearly convey the solution we are trying to sell because of my tendency to focus on detail the customer probably does not need to understand but I think is the interesting part of the problem.

Conversely sometimes the sales people gloss over important technology choices which have a deeper impact on the overall solution. I was recently in such a situation where as part of a larger project the subject of internationalisation (you can see why it gets abbreviated to i18n) was raised.

I had little direct personal experience with handling this within a project workflow so could not give any guidance but the salesman recommended the Transifex service as he had seen it used before, indicated integration was simple and we moved onto the next topic.

Unfortunately previous experience tells me that sometime in the near future someone is going to ask me hard technical questions about i18n and possibly how to integrate Transifex into their workflow (or at least give a good estimate on the work required).
LearningBeing an engineer I have few coping strategies available for situations when I do not know how something works. The approach I best know how to employ is to give myself a practical crash course and write up what I learned...so I did.

I proceeded to do all the usual things you do when approaching something unfamiliar (wikipedia, google, colleagues etc.) and got a basic understanding of internationalisation and localisation and how they fit together.

This enabled me to understand that the Transifex workflow proposed only covered the translation part of the problem and that, as Aldrich observed in my title quote, there is an awful lot more to translation than I suspected.
PlatformsMy research indicated that there are numerous translation platforms available for both open source and commercial projects and Transifex is one of many solutions.

Although the specific platform used was Transifex most of these observations apply to all these other platforms. The main lesson though is that all platforms are special snowflakes and once a project invests effort and time into one platform it will result in the dreaded lock in. The effort to move to another platform afterwards is at least as great as the initial implementation.

It became apparent to me that all of these services, regardless of their type, boil down to a very simple data structure. They appear to be a trivial table of Key:Language:Value wrapped in a selection of tools to perform format conversions and interfaces to manipulate the data.

There may be facilities to attach additional metadata to the table such as groupings for specific sets of keys (often referred to as resources) or translator hints to provide context but the fundamental operation is common.

The pseudo workflow is:

• Import a set of keys
• Provide a resource grouping for the keys.
• Import any existing translations for these keys.
• Use the services platform to provide additional translations
• Export the resources in the desired languages.

The Transifex service does at least allow for the Key values to be arbitrary although the resources are separated by language.

Even assuming a project uses gettext PO files and UTF-8 character encoding (and please can we kill every other character encoding and move the whole world to UTF-8) the tools to integrate the import/export into the project must be written.

A project must decide some pretty important policies, including:

• Will they use a single service to provide all their translations.
• Will they allow updates to the files in their revision control system and how those will be integrated.
• Will there be a verification step and if so who and how will that be performed. Especially important is the question of a reviewer understanding the translated language being integrated and how that is controlled.
• Will the project be paying for translations
• Will the project allow machine translations, if not can they be used as an initial hint (sometimes useful if the translators are weak in the "default" language

These are project policy decisions and, as I discovered, just as difficult to answer as the technical challenges.

Armed with my basic understanding it was time to move on and see how the transifex platform could be integrated into a real project workflow.
ImplementingProof of conceptMy first exercise was to take a trivial command line tool, use xgettext to generate a PO file and add the relevant libintl calls to produce gettext internationalised tool.

A transifex project was created and the english po file uploaded as the initial resource. A french language was added and the online editor used to provide translations for some strings. The PO resource file for french was exported and the tool executed with LANGUAGE=fr and the french translation seen.

This proved the trivial workflow was straightforward to implement. It also provided insight into the need to automate the process as the manual website operation would soon become exceptionally tedious and error prone.
Something more usefulTo get a better understanding of a real world workflow I needed a project that:

• Already internationalised but had limited language localisation
• Did not directly use gettext
• Had a code base I understood
• Could be modified reasonably easily.
• Might find the result useful rather than it being a purely academic exercise.

I selected the NetSurf web browser as it best fit this list.

Internally NetSurf keeps all the translated messages in a simple associative array this is serialised to an equally straightforward file named FatMessages. The file is UTF-8 encoded with keys separated from values by a colon. The Key is constrained to be ASCII characters with no colons and is structured as language.toolkit.identifier and is unique on identifier part alone.

This file is processed at build time into a simple identifier:value dictionary for each language and toolkit.

Transifex can import several resource formats similar to this, after experimenting with YAML and Android Resource format I immediately discovered a problem, the services import and export routines were somewhat buggy.

These routines coped ok with simple use cases but having more complex characters such as angle brackets and quotation marks in the translated strings would completely defeat the escaping mechanisms employed by both these formats (through entity escaping in android resource format XML is problematic anyway)

Finally the Java property file format was used (with UTF-8 encoding) which while having bugs in the import and export escaping these could at least be worked around. The existing tool that was used to process the FatMessages file was rewritten to cope with generating different output formats and a second tool to merge the java property format resources.

To create these two tools I enlisted the assistance of my colleague Vivek Dasmohapatra as his Perl language skills exceeded my own. He eventually managed to overcome the format translation issues and produce correct input and output.

I used the Transifex platforms free open source product, created a new project and configured it for free machine translation from the Microsoft service, all of which is pretty clearly documented by Transifex.

Once this was done the messages file was split up tinto resources for the supported languages and uploaded to the transifex system.

I manually marked all the uploaded translations as "verified" and then added a few machine translations to a couple of languages. I also created spanish as a new language and machine translated most of the keys.

The resources for each language were then downloaded and merged and the resulting FatMessages file checked for differences and verified only the changes I expected appeared.

I quickly determined that manually downloading the language resources every time was not going to work with any form of automation, so I wrote a perl script to retrieve the resources automatically (might be useful for other projects too).

Once these tools were written and integrated into the build system I could finally make an evaluation as to how successful this exercise had been.
ConclusionsThe main things I learned from this investigation were:

• Internationalisation has a number of complex areas
• Localisation to a specific locale is more than a mechanical process.
• The majority of platforms and services are oriented around textural language translation
• There is a concentration on the gettext mode of operation in many platforms
• Integration to any of these platforms requires both workflow and technical changes.
• At best tools to integrate existing resources into the selected platform need to be created
• Many project will require format conversion tools, necessitating additional developer time to create.
• The social issues within an open source project may require compromise on the workflow.
• The external platform may offer little benefits beyond a pretty user interface.
• External platforms introduce an external dependency unless the project is prepared and able to run its own platform instance.
• Real people are still required to do the translations and verify them.

Vijay Kumar gave an interesting TED talk about autonomous UAVs [1]. His research is based on helicopters with 4 sets of blades and his group has developed software to allow them to develop maps, fly in formation, and more. Hadiyah wrote an interesting post about networking at TED 2012 [2]. It seems that giving every delegate the opportunity to have their bio posted is a good conference feature that others could copy. Bruce Schneier wrote a good summary of the harm that post-911 airport security has caused [3]. Chris Neugebauer wrote an insightful post about the drinking culture in conferences, how it excludes people and distracts everyone from the educational purpose of the conference [4]. Matthew Wright wrote an informative article for Beyond Zero Emissions comparing current options for renewable power with the unproven plans for new nuclear and fossil fuel power plants [5]. The Free Universal Construction Kit is a set of design files to allow 3D printing of connectors between different types of construction kits (Lego, Fischer Technic, etc) [6]. Jay Bradner gave an interesting TED talk about the use of Open Source principles in cancer research [7]. He described his research into drugs which block cancer by converting certain types of cancer cell into normal cells and how he shared that research to allow the drugs to be developed for clinical use as fast as possible. Christopher Priest wrote an epic blog post roasting everyone currently associated with the Arthur C. Clarke awards, he took particular care to flame Charles Stross who celebrated The Prestige of such a great flaming by releasing a t-shirt [8]. For a while I ve been hoping that an author like Charles Stross would manage to make more money from t-shirt sales than from book sales, Charles is already publishing some of his work for free on the Internet and it would be good if he could publish it all for free. Erich Schubert wrote an interesting post about the utility and evolution of Favebook likes [9]. Richard Hartmann wrote an interesting summary of the problems with Google products that annoy him the most [10]. Sam Varghese wrote an insightful article about the political situation in China [11]. The part about the downside of allowing poorly educated people to vote seems to apply to the US as well. Sociological Images has an article about the increased rate of Autism diagnosis as social contagion [12]. People who get their children diagnosed encourage others with similar children to do the same. Vivek wrote a great little post about setting up WPA on Debian [13]. It was much easier than expected once I followed that post. Of course I probably could have read the documentation for ifupdown, but who reads docs when Google is available?

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_cooperate.html
• [2] http://hadiyahdotme.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/ted2012-and-why-conferences-will-never-be-the-same/
• [3] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/harms_of_post-9.html
• [4] http://chris.neugebauer.id.au/2012/04/06/do-australian-tech-conferences-suffer-from-a-culture-of-exclusion-how-do-we-avoid-it/
• [5] http://beyondzeroemissions.org/media/newswire/clean-fossils-future-how-about-ready-renewables-120404
• [6] http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_bradner_open_source_cancer_research.html
• [8] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/03/buy-the-tee-shirt.html
• [9] http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201204/2012041101-are-likes-still-worth-anything.html
• [10] http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2012/04/13-woegle-is-me/
• [11] http://wildcard.gnubies.com/?p=1940
• [12] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/03/21/the-rise-of-autism-social-contagion-or-environmental-causation/
• [13] http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-linux-wpa-wpa2-wireless-wifi-networking/

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