varnam

Firefox is one sleek browser and comes with features like Tabbed Browsing, Pop-up Blocking and integrated search. But most of us like browsers with <insert your favourite feature> feature. We also like bloatware. Firefox lets you decide how obese you want your browser to be through extensions. By installing extensions, you can choose those features without which your life would be meaningless.

Recently Anita Pfaff was in India and when asked about the disappearance of her father Subhash Chandra Bose she said that he could have perished in the air crash of 1945.

Anita Pfaff, 63, who is on a visit here, told IANS: "I don't think he survived. Unless some fantastically new evidence comes up, if I look at the data available to me, he did not survive.

"I have been present at the interview of some of the survivors of the plane crash, including some Japanese officers, more than 20 years ago, and their story sounded quite consistent, credible and reasonable."

She says: "Some speculation was also in the reports that the doctor who treated Netaji after the crash when interviewed this time had confusion about what he said earlier. He is 90 years old now and you can't expect much from an interview unless it is done very carefully of a person of that age.

"Ultimately what he said many years ago made a lot more sense. You certainly have lapses in memory when you become old. Even if his new interview sort of raked up some controversy I would not place too much emphasis on it." [My father did not survive the air crash: Netaji's daughter]

The Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry has submitted the report to the Parliament and it is supposed to be tabled along with an action taken report by the end of February. Already leaked news has provided some fascinating twists like the fact that there was no air crash and the ashes kept in Japan were not that of Subhash Bose. There is also some evidence that Nehru knew the truth and kept quiet.

Justice Mukherjee was unhappy with the way his visits to Russia and Japan were handled by the Govt. and Anita Pfaff has said that she does not expect anything terribly new to come out of the Mukherjee report. We need to wait till the end of February to see if she is right.

Larry Page's keynote at the CES in Las Vegas was one sold out show. Few things he mentioned made sense, while a major annoucement, Google Pack, did not impress that much.

Now shifting to talk about electrical power. Shows photo of power adapter clutter. "Why can't we just standardize the power with a really nice power supply? (shot of happy power supply) We really needs standards in these areas.

"Most devices can be connected through adapters. You can basically adapt anything to USB for like $20. Do you really need all these ports running around? I don't think it's really necessary. Phones have been a really positive example. You can connect any bluetooth headset to any blue [Live coverage of Google Keynote with Robin Williams]

Though there were rumors that Google would unveil a cheap PC running the Google OS, noting of that sort happened. Instead Google announced a video store as well as Google Pack. Google Pack makes it convenient to install various pieces of software easily as well as manage the updates. The pack includes software from Google like Earth, Picassa, Desktop and Desktop Toolbar as well as third party software like Real Player, Firefox, Norton Antivirus, Ad Aware, and Adobe Reader.

Google decided to do the pack to make it easy for users to manage the installed set of programs. They also like software which comply with their list of software principles and one of the items mentioned in the list is Upfront Disclosure.

When an application is installed or enabled, it should inform you of its principal and significant functions. And if the application makes money by showing you advertising, it should clearly and conspicuously explain this. This information should be presented in a way that a typical user will see and understand -- not buried in small print that requires you to scroll. For example, if the application is paid for by serving pop-up ads or sending your personal data to a third party, that should be made clear to you.[Software Principles]

The second point is against the Norton Antivirus which is also included in the Pack. The installed version comes with a six month subscription of updates, and after that you have to purchase. Since Google's policy seems to be to buy companies and make their software available for free (Picassa, Earth), it goes against that trend to sell subscriptions of Norton Antivirus.

While some think that Google Pack is directed against Microsoft, there is nothing in the pack which reduces Microsoft's revenue or attacks their cash cows. It would have been useful if the Pack contained Open Office. With user having to give their first born to buy a version of Microsoft Office, this would have been a direct hit on Microsoft.

By Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to Kerala Communists

Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee took a swipe at the hardline fringe of the Kerala unit which has yet to come to terms with the reforms within. ''Why should we oppose foreign companies if they bring in jobs? Why should we oppose shopping malls from MNCs if they provide employment to our jobless youth?'' he said. [Why are you afraid of foreign firms if they give jobs]

Jobless youth are required to destroy public property and bring life to standstill depending on if Achyutanandan or Pinarayi Vijayan got out on the wrong side of the bed. Giving such lectures will not change anything and so we need to follow the tactics in HOWTO: Develop Kerala document.

The first time I came to know about Heinrich Harrer was when I saw the movie Seven Years in Tibet. The movie was kind of boring, but Harrer's life was fascinating. In the movie he escapes from a POW camp in Darjeeling in 1944 and crosses the mountainson foot to reach Tibet, thus being one of few westerners to reach there. He spends 7 years there, tutoring a young Dalai Lama, who many years later would take the reverse route to India

He was an accomplished mountaineer as well, climbing the Eiger, regarded as a major test of climbing ability.

After the Eiger's hazardous east ridge was scaled in 1921, only the north face remained unconquered. The first nine climbers who attempted it in the 1930s all died.

In August 1935 two Germans, Max Sedlmayer and Karl Mehringer, made their assault on the wall. The men were abruptly halted 3,000 feet up by a terrible storm, accompanied by freezing temperatures and frequent avalanches.

They survived on the face for five agonising days, bivouacking there for four nights before freezing to death. Four more climbers died the next year while trying to retreat.

Then, in July 1938, an Austro-German team of four, Anderl Heckmair, Ludwig Vörg, Fritz Kasparek and Heinrich Harrer, made it to the top. It took the men, who had only decided to team up at the base of the wall, more than three days to reach the summit.[The ultimate alpine challenge]

They met Hitler and Goebbels who praised them for their achievement. Harrer died this week. In such an eventful life his only regret must have been that he was portrayed by Brad Pitt on screen.

Do you want to know about Indian history and how European Aryans came to India? Take a look at the SABHA version, assembled from the works of "scholars".

Stanley Wolpert explains lucidly in his book, The New History of India, the fate of the inhabitants of this civilization.

Around 2000 B.C. the original Indo-European speaking, seminomadic barbarians, who most probably lived in the region between the Caspian and the Black seas, were driven by some natural disaster, possibly drought, prolonged frost, or plague. Elaborating on the type of natural disaster, he writes,

Whatever the cause of their dispersion - it may even have been a series of Mongol invasions from Central Asia - the ancestors . . . were forced to flee from Southern Russia to survive.

We chose "whatever" as the cause (since we haven't yet figured out how a series of Mongol invasions falls under the category of natural disasters), and were in luck when we found the actual explanation buried in an article by Michael Witzel! Apparently, civilizations developed on pond sides! A tsunami from the pond must have drowned the entire civilization. Well, not quite the entire civilization. The male members and horse chariots survived! [SABHA 4M Report]

More and more evidence is surfacing which is disproving the Aryan Tourist Theory^TM. Archaeological and genetic evidence do not show that there was a massive migration of Europeans to India. They did not teach us agriculture also.

Recently there was a controversy in Kerala over Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse's visit to Guruvayoor temple. It seems his wife entered the temple and the issue was if she was a Christian or a Buddhist. In Guruvayoor temple only Hindus are allowed to enter and there is a strict dress code. Men have to remove their shirt and wear a mundu. Women are allowed to wear only sarees and girls have to wear a skirt and blouse.

This is one busy temple and there is a guard at the door checking to see if you confirm to the dress code and I am not sure if he checks the religion also. If so, it would be an amazing skill, for there is no easy way to find the religion of an Indian, unless he is wearing a symbol, like the cross. Due to this it is possible for people of any religion to enter the temple, but only famous people are stopped.

So when Congress leader, Vayalar Ravi's son's marriage was conducted in Guruvayoor, the authorities had to clean the temple because Vayalar Ravi's wife was a Christian. If it were two ordinary folks, no one would have questioned this nor cleaned the temple. Other famous people who have been denied entry are singer Yesudas, who is a devotee of Guruvayoorappan and poet Yusuf Ali Kecheri, who lives close to the temple and has written many devotional songs.

But then how can we assume that all Hindus too are devotees? Communists are known to be atheists and what is the logic in allowing them to enter the temple. Recently in a statement, the temple authorities said that people of Buddhist and Jain faiths are allowed entry, since they are treated on par with Hinduism. This even more odd since both these religions do not recognize God as Hindus do. In Jainism, there is no creator god and a person is responsible for his actions. Buddha claimed that his enlightenment was not due to any divine intervention. It seems illogical that when followers of such agnostic religions are allowed entry, people who believe in Guruvayoorappan are not.

Related Links: Anand writes on the reforms initiated by his father at Guruvayoor. Bhavane rolls his eyes as he reads about the marxist temple minister. Rajeev Srinivasan makes the counterpoint.

Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans:

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (NAY'-gin) is suggesting that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and other storms were a sign that "God is mad at America" and at black communities too

Pat Robertson on Thursday linked Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke to God's “Enmity against those ‘who divide my land.’” “He was dividing God's land and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations, or the United States of America," Robertson said on his television program, “The 700 Club," Broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network in Virginia Beach. “God says 'this land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.’”

Looking at the log files of varnam.org, I find that a lot of visitors do not use any feed readers, instead come to the site via a bookmark or by typing varnam.org/blog in the address bar. This means that you are visiting this site daily, to see if there are any words of wisdom from me and believe me, it is the most inefficient way to read blogs.

If you read news from about three hundred sources daily, imagine how much time would be wasted if you had to manually check each site for updates. Some folks like The Acorn have many posts each day, while Seriously Sandeep and The Palm Leaf are not updated daily. Now there is software available which can keep track of blogs, let you know which have been updated, all for free. This is how I read about three hundred blogs daily and efficiently.

If America is the place from where globalization is radiating outward, then all American industries would be secure and only rest of the world would be in trouble, but it not so. Few American industries are in dire straits and the reason for it is globalization.

Ford, America's second largest auto maker announced yesterday that it would shutdown fourteen facilities and fire a quarter of its work force (about 30,000 people). This comes as no surprise to anyone living here. It was obvious when they started giving employee discounts to entice people to buy their cars that disaster was on its way. Employee discount which means customers can buy a Ford car for the same discounted price as employees was one of the master plans that the management came up to boost sales. Also they could not afford to stay away from the race since the other American car makers, GM and Chrysler were also offering it.

It is not just Ford which is in trouble. Chrysler which saw a dip in sales started offering free gasoline and maintenance for two years. Other are extending the warranty and soon American car makers might pay you money if you agree to take one vehicle from the showroom.

All the while the CEOs of these companies never even paused for a moment to wonder why their sales are dipping. Getting to the root cause of the problem never seems to taught in management classes here. The problem was that American car makers were making cars which the consumer did not want while Japanese car makers Toyota and Honda were successully selling cars and increasing their market share. Toyota which will soon beat GM as the world's largest automaker outsold Chrysler in December.

In this whole episode, just having capitalism did not help the consumer, for the local capitalists did not want to build fuel efficient cars or ones with hybrid technology. The manufacturers from Japan understood the customer needs and are killing the players who could not adapt. Thanks to globalization, the American consumers are getting the vehicles they want.

Some management consultants are going to take millions of dollars and educate the American car makers something which commonsense and globalization should have taught them - listen to the customers.

Related Stories: The Toyota Story

When you think of poverty, countries like Saudi Arabia and United States do not come to mind, but there are pockets of poverty in both these countries. In Saudi Arabia, the guess would be that the poor people would be the expatriate people and the guess would be wrong. It seems there are poor Saudis too.

The image of Saudi Arabia abroad is of a land teaming with wealth and opportunity — the “oil-rich desert Kingdom” as the international media insist on saying. Inside the Kingdom, it is a rather different picture. Yes, there is wealth and opportunity — and massive development — but there is also poverty. The slums of south Riyadh or south Jeddah are real and shocking. It is not expatriate laborers who live in such places; it is poor Saudis. They cannot afford anything better. Nor is poverty confined to places like Qarantina in Jeddah or Suwaidi in Riyadh. There is serious rural poverty as well; as elsewhere, it manifests itself in substandard, rundown accommodation.

For many years, Saudi poverty was a taboo subject, unspoken by those who saw it as shameful and who foolishly imagined that by ignoring it, it would go away. It was Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah who, as crown prince, broke the taboo. His unprecedented visit to the slums of Suwaidi just over three years ago brought poverty into the open and with it a determination address the issue. [Poverty in the Kingdom]

This city at the heart of the richest farmland in the world has been poor for so long, no one can remember it otherwise. Last month, when the Brookings Institution issued a report that said a higher proportion of poor people in Fresno lived in areas of concentrated poverty than in any other major city in the country -- pre-Katrina New Orleans was number two -- no one here was surprised. "My goodness, that's why I ran," said Alan Autry, who became mayor in 2000. "I called it 'A Tale of Two Cities.' "[In Fresno, Tackling Poverty Moves to the Top of the Agenda]

Thanks to Jim Reverend's Lecturn, both Varnam and The Palm Leaf now have comments feeds available so that you do not miss the exciting discussions that happen here. Please subscribe to them using your feed reader

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Assuming that Ayman al-Zawahiri was present in the Pakistani village of Damadola, an unmanned American aircraft fired four Hellfire missiles at a mud walled compound killing 18 people. Few Al Qaeda members including the weapons expert Midhat Mursi was killed in the attack. While this attack got major press coverage both in United States and in Pakistan, there was another minor incident which happened a week before it which was not noticed much. According to Jim Hoagland, some foreign troops landed in Saidgi in North Waziristan, grabbed some folks and flew back into Afghanistan.

All this happened due to the help Musharraf is doing to prevent terrorism from Pakistani soil. Remember how he tried to hoodwink India into believing that there are no terrorists in Pakistan. He has been trying to do the same with the Americans. But since Americans are not Indians, they decided to take matters into their own hands and teach Musharraf a lesson.

"You can draw the Afghan-Pakistan border on a map by looking at the pattern of signal intercepts," says one U.S. official. "The bad guys chatter away in Pakistan, feeling they are safe. That area lights up like a Christmas tree. Then they go silent when they cross into Afghanistan, where they fear getting hit."

Two limited, carefully planned border attacks in rapid succession would appear to be something more than accidents of opportunity. The escalation by terrorists in Afghanistan has been met with an escalation, still at a low level, in U.S. attacks on Pakistani soil. Musharraf's failure to curb the terrorist forays into Afghanistan after the incursion at Saidgi conceivably led to the attack on Damadola and the death of innocents there.[Message to Musharraf]

Goh Chok Tong, Former Prime Minister of Singapore was in India recently and gave a speech asking India to accelerate the pace of reforms.

Arguing that the old mindset opposed to competition on the plea of foreign economic colonisation and the theory of protectionism would only breed complacency and inefficiency. He said "competition drives economic growth; you lose some but you win more," and urged the Indian government to remove impediments to healthy competition.[Indian atma biswas and the positive sum economics of trade]

"India: the world's fastest-growing free-market democracy," proclaims one sign. Others will extol India's growing business prowess (it now boasts 91 companies with revenues of $1 billion-plus), its $500 billion stock market capitalization, and its vast and youthful consumer market.

Waiting for visitors at their hotel rooms will be gifts from India -- a pashmina shawl, an Apple (AAPL) iPod loaded with Indian pop and classical music, a piece of traditional art, some ayurvedic oils -- along with a CD packed with all sorts of economic information about the country.[Davos Days, Bollywood Nights]

Ignoring all that, it is important that India perform the right song and dance routine where it matters and display its cultural power along with the economic might. As the Globalization Institute notes

The figures tell a story. Economic growth is expected to be 8% in 2006, at a time when Japan would consider 1% a major success. There are now 91 businesses in India with turnover in excess of $1 billion, stock market capitalisation is in the $500 billion range, and there are reportedly over 200 million people learning English in India.

It's worth contrasting this image with the pessimistic predictions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. India was headed for "inevitable" mass famine. Its population would drop as disease and chronic malnutrition raised the death rate. Corruption was seen as "endemic" and the combination of bureaucracy, protectionism, and a willingness to support the pirating of foreign trade marks were major obstacles to inward investment.[India flaunts it at Davos]

Tags: Globalization Davos India Economics

Jo, has a new episode of his Malayalam podcast M-POD. This time it is an interview with Dr. C. R Rajagopal who teaches Malayalam at Sree Kerala Varma College, Thrissur. He is also the director of Centre for Indigenous Knowledge, a group working on documenting traditional knowledge.

To explain the value of traditional knowledge, he sang a a very nice folk song about various types of seeds and when to farm them. This song was from a book Krishi Geetha (Krishi = Farming) written in the 17th century and was taught in schools. Not anymore.

As people worked with nature, they observed many facts about weather, plants, animals and such information was captured in stories, legends, songs, and sayings. They also had art forms which captured various rituals. This knowledge is getting lost and now there are about 60 groups in Kerala which sing these songs and transmit the knowledge from the older generation to the younger. There are audio albums, photo albums and books available which capture these words of wisdom. A very commendable effort indeed.

If you are a Malayalee, then the words, globalization and western culture has to be used in a negative connotation due to how the Malayali DNA is structured. This word appears in this interview also for no reason. In his introduction Jo mentions that Dr. Rajagopal is going to tell us about knowledge which is getting lost due to the big influence of western culture in our lives. Then Dr. Rajagopal utters the word globalization in an unusual situation.

He said that collecting this information is required due to the globalized situation we are in. According to him, this information can also be used for fight globalization which according to him is trying to grab the intellectual property of local people. He has contempt for the current culture (calls it Azha Kuzhamban culture) and wishes that people would pay more attention to this knowledge.

Globalization has definitely introduced problems and the patent fights for Basmati and Neem are good examples. There is no doubt that local knowledge is getting lost, but it would happen even if the forces of globalization were not present.

Long time back itself, farmers stopped cultivating land and started selling it off for real estate due to the increased labor costs. Now due to the excellent living conditions in Kerala bought about by the globalization of labor, no one wants to work for a living. Fruits and vegetables come from Tamil Nadu and when there is a lorry strike, the prices of everything goes up. When you are not farming anymore, what is the need of songs which talk about various seeds?

Second, knowledge is being lost as people from villages move to towns. We are not talking of Dubai here, but towns in Kerala. Half of the knowledge of grandmothers get lost when mothers live far away from them. When this knowledge is transmitted by the mother to her offspring, some more knowledge is lost. Even if you exclude globalization, information is just lost as the current generation does not need it. This is happening in each family living in Kerala itself.

Instead of blaming everything on globalization, such people should take advantage of the forces of globalization to spread the knowledge. Already they are doing it by collaborating with universities and organizations outside India, creating websites and multimedia and by producing such podcasts. What is required is an attitude change to look at the positive power that globalization can provide.

Related Links: Blame it on globalization

Tags: Globalization Kerala Podcast Indigenous Knowledge

A healthy herbal beer, invented by an Indian is to hit UK markets. The beer promises much less hangover. Lady Bird Bio Beer contains aloe vera - more commonly found in health food shops - and medicinal herbs.

The beer has the same alcohol strength - five per cent - like all other regular beer. The difference however, according to its inventor Dr Srinivasa Amarnath is that it will leave you with less of a sore head.

Dr Amarnath, who has apparently worked on the particular beer for a decade claims it, has health benefits. He claims it can alleviate conditions such as asthma and arthritis. [Indian to launch herbal beer in UK]