Trump just fired a federal CEO for violating that law and replacing 200 Americans with H1B workers.
That is a conservative leader in the west.
Here in India, the contracts for many many infrastructure projects, including the ₹3,000 crore statue of Patel, have been handed over to Chinese companies. The UPA was doing it and the NDA doubled down on it. These companies employ Chinese workers in India to do work that Indians are fully competent of doing.
It is only after China occupied Indian territory for the Nth time along our borders, that the government of India woke up and started taking some basic action. Till then, it was immune to even the most scathing criticism of outsourcing to China.
अर्थात, in India, our leaders are so incompetent and lazy, they can't even get conservatism right.
[ Conservatism isn't absolutely wrong. You give me one reason why the US should allow replacement of American workers with foreign workers on US soil. And that too for government work. Perhaps Communist Russia followed a policy of वसुधैव कुटुँबकम, but I highly doubt it. And I speak as a person with some context, having worked in the US twice on an H1B. I would hate to go in and replace an existing worker at lower wages. That is not what the H1B program was meant to do. It isn't about saving costs, it is about bringing talent to the US that is otherwise missing. It sets a minimum bar for salary. Unfortunately that bar barely translates to a middle class lifestyle in areas like New York and San Francisco, which is why the program is being abused, mostly by Indian outsourcing firms. ]
I wish right wing supporters in India would occasionally hold their elected leaders to account. Why did the government have to wait six years to double down on promoting domestic manufacturing (I am not talking schemes, I am talking actual numbers). Why are large civil and telecom infrastructure projects being rolled out with Chinese, Japanese or western technology?
One of the comments on the post: मुझे अब इस प्रकार से रेलवे के कुकृत्य देखकर शर्म आ रही है।जिस देश में आज भी लोग ट्रेन में भेड़ बकरियों की तरह सफर करने को मजबूत वहां स्टेशन के सृंगार पटार पर करोड़ों का खर्च ।मेरे टैक्स के पैसे से अमीरों कि ऐशगाह बन रही है।आज वास्तव में मैं इस शासन में रहकर शर्मिंदा हूं। काश मैं भी अपने हक़ के लिए नक्सली की तरह लड़ पाता
This is the same railways that doesn't have money to pay salaries and pensions. An organisation that cannot even take care of its own people, has money to serve the political agendas of the ruling party. The railways has forgotten that it exists only on the basis of its people.
Till recently, all the knowledge was in Sanskrit medium, and Brahmins stopping everyone from learning Sanskrit.
The British came and shook that up.
Now the meaningful knowledge is all in English. And brahminical politicians are telling the poor and the bahujans who attend government schools, that they cannot have English medium education.
कल ईद थी। ख़बर मिली है कि काफ़ी लोगों की दुआएं आज कुबूल हुई हैं।
कल राखी का त्योहार है। आवाम को अपनी खुशी ज़ोर शोर से ज़ाहिर करने का बहाना मिल गया।
चचा हमारे आपके, इसी सन्दर्भ में कुछ कह के निकले थे:
बाज़ीचा-ए-अत्फ़ाल है दुनिया, मेरे आगे होता है शब-ओ-रोज तमाशा, मेरे आगे
मत पूछ कि क्या हाल है मेरा तेरे पीछे तू देख कि क्या रंग है तेरा, मेरे आगे
हमपेशा-ओ-हमशरब-ओ-हमराज़ है मेरा 'ग़ालिब' को बुरा क्यों, कहो अच्छा, मेरे आगे
Edit: Looks like we need versions of this post in Kannada and Tamil also. काफ़ी जगहों से दुआएँ कुबूल होने की ख़बर आई है। Of course it could all be a तमाशा also, like I was saying.
Here is a song for our times: https://youtu.be/bzkdY9JDgSQ. Do watch.
Harry Chapin's Cats in the Cradle has been my go-to song since I've had kids. It centres me on what is important, resets my priorities whenever I've let them run astray: https://youtu.be/etundhQa724.
Often you can be with the kids but not mentally present, because of your screen or your wandering mind. Baatein Karo talks of that. I suppose this wasn't as much of an issue in Chapin's time.
Liana Hu, an Indian of Chinese and German ethnicity features in the video: https://www.instagram.com/liana.hu/
Regional languages and Hindi will be the medium of instruction till grade 5, "wherever possible".
Parents have made it amply clear that they would rather send their children to poorly run private English medium schools, than well run vernacular government schools. I don't know about Kerala, but this is the situation in the cow belt.
Private schools will continue to use English because it will "not be possible" for them to use Hindi etc. Government schools will continue to "lag". Children switching states, or moving from regional to English medium in grade 6, will suffer the most.
Off with all this language chauvinism. English is a useful, employment generating skill. Mastering a non native language is hard, unless you study all the other subjects in it too. Let people learn in their medium of choice. If Bangalore can have Urdu and Tamil medium schools, it can also have English medium government schools, can't it? And the whole thing reeks of classism and casteism, because government owned KV and Army schools, where kids of officers study, will continue to use English as the medium of instruction.
Rural children with non English speaking parents who study science and maths in English, find these subjects hard to grasp. But their grasp on English improves. If viral videos of vegetable sellers and taxi drivers speaking fluent English tell us anything, it is that we Indians value this skill more than all other education.
If this weren't true, we wouldn't be so embarrassed about our PM not being able to spell strength and tomorrow.
A lot of what is happening in politics in India, particularly the horror that is the media, is a direct copy of the polarisation in politics that happened in the US. I read a short comment on the Internet and thought it would be instrumental to understand it.
'It's due to an Overton Window shift that started with Reagan. Around that time they figured out how to use wedge issues to their fullest (guns, abortion, statues, etc) to make people ignore economic issues. They've also spent a ton of time and money getting folks "punching down" at the class below them.'
Plants that aren't feeling too well end up in the nursery. It is at a prominent place in the house, where we can look at these plants wilting or recovering, all day long. The spot is bright but doesn't get direct sunlight, and is neither cold nor warm. We don't know what else to do for these plants, other than making sure they are hydrated, and giving them the occasional pep talk.
As a result of my poor gardening skills, there is a 50-50 chance plants in the nursery end up in the mortuary. Every Sunday, Kavin rips out the dead plants in a solemn ceremony, and plants moneyplants in the pots. Moneyplants thrive at our home.
This is the corner where I am supposed to relax with a book. Supposed to. I hope some day I get the time and peace to do that.
Many of us were unfortunate enough to grow up knowing her as merely a bandit, a dacoit. All those years of reading the Hindustan Times took its toll.
And then all of a sudden she was an MP and you were like, "Wait, what, now dacoits can capture booths and win elections?"
And then there was the Bandit Queen movie, which you couldn't watch because it had adult themes and strong language and you were still a child.
Misinformation.
I currently have two copies of 1984 on my bed. Nilay is trying to force feed the book to me. He says it is the book that people most commonly claim that they have read when they actually haven't. I'm guilty as charged. He has read it and he insists I do too.
Whether I read the book or not, at least my children know what misinformation is, and will hopefully not make opinions about the great leaders of our times based on how mass media chooses to portray them.
Happy to have been be proven wrong on this one. This article says antibodies are being formed, and reinfections are anecdotal and scientifically unproven.
One of the big tragedies of modern economies, both capitalist and otherwise, is that all goods in the world become fungible commodities (eventually). From the love of farming and the passion of art, to the attention to detail in a user interface, everything is reduced to a ₹ figure. A lot of things end up being very cheap, price tag wise. You can "afford" to throw them away.
You can purchase a painting or pottery item, and when you don't like it any more, you can just throw someone's creativity in the trash heap. Similarly, you can take rice cooked with tremendous effort and just throw it away because you served yourself too much.
What is the solution to this? The price for human effort is very low. Even when the market "adequately compensates" farmers for their effort, that effort adds a pittance to the overall fork price of food.
I don't suppose the right approach is to add another cost or levy, such as the opportunity cost of someone else not eating that foodgrain, into the price of food. That's the kind of fancy behaviour change stuff that only looks good in economics journals. I'd much rather go for the basic sensitisation and education of consumers.
Every day the police forces in India, the US and other countries dig a bigger hole for themselves with their brutality and lawlessness. The rise of fascism and hypercapitalism is built on the back of police violence. How long can the public protest non violently against militarised central forces that are above the law?
I reached out to some of my friends to ask for a woman's perspective of adolescence.
A universal theme is body image issues. Things are bad enough with all the feminine body changes ("hair everywhere"). But to deal with people telling you that you don't look pretty enough, sexy enough. And very often these are the closest people in your life. Indian parents have a long, long way to go.
I introspected and realised that I'm guilty of not watching my tongue near teenage girls. To call a twelve year old girl मोटी or भुक्कड़ when she is tucking in her favourite dish is commonplace. But the damage it does could be permanent.
Apart from body shaming, there is other kinds of damage that women my age have suffered at the hands of their parents. Many have got relief through therapy. The desire to "control" girls and the female form is just so overwhelming, I suppose.
And not to be forgotten, the lifelong roller coaster of hormonal changes begins at this age. Yeah, I would need a vacation every month just to deal with periods. I can't imagine having to deal with body image issues, parents, peers and लोग क्या कहेंगे on top of all that. Phew.
I suppose the overarching theme in all this is - if you can't say something nice to a kid, then just keep your stupid trap shut.
To be inside the mind of a 13 year old boy is to be trapped in a palace of horrors. Few women realise this. Most men, once grown up, forget this frightful experience and never go back to that dark corner of their psyche.
What people call adolescence is, to me, the sudden unleashing of our genetic code. You go from being a child to (wanting to) being a man. And the man that your inner genetic code tells you to be, was programmed over a billion years to do just one thing - survive.
Ten thousand years of civilisation is but a scratch on a billion years of genetic learning. Those of us who deal with machine learning know that the algorithm will learn exactly what you feed it. For a billion years our genetic code was fed death, destruction, violence, trauma and uncertainty. And why go back ten thousand years? Till a hundred years ago, average human life expectancy was 28 years.
So how would you program an automaton that went suddenly from being a child in the care of his family, to a man who needed to build his own family and hunt, gather, protect. Any way you did it, it would not be pretty. In the jungles of Africa or Asia, or the bitter cold of Europe, love, compassion and tenderness would not even help you survive, leave alone thrive.
Love works for a peacock that evolution has armed with beauty and flight. What attraction does the 5-foot-something hairless human ape possess for the human female, if not power? You have to be able to fight (to protect), you have to be able to provide (usually by killing or grabbing).
Cut to 2020 and this game of power plays inside the mind of every innocent child rapidly losing his innocence. The world around him, the only world he has seen, is a gentle place. But the code has stayed the same. The code messes with his mind, and screams at him to turn into a person that he knows isn't the kind of person he wants to be.
To walk with the brain of a human male on your shoulders is a heavy burden. And each one of us who has tamed that beast and turned it into a respectable citizen deserves appreciation. (If no one else will appreciate you, look into the mirror and tell yourself that you have done well.) As you walk down the street with a male head, it notices everything in its field of vision. Every shiny, expensive object. Every delicious piece of food. Every hint of cleavage. Every curve and sinew of every woman and man ahead of you. When driving through familiar territory, it builds a map as it goes, recording every change in landscape or shopfront. You are doing one thing and your subconscious mind is always doing another.
To tame this beast through your teenage, so you do not turn into a vile adult who goes around snatching what he likes and touching or gawking at everything he finds attractive, is a feat of immense courage. Every day you struggle with morality. Is it wrong to be attracted to women? Is it bad to think of sex? You wake up in cold sweat - your sleeping mind imagined kissing someone who your waking mind considers a respectable friend - and then for a week or two you hate yourself.
Every teenager has been given a caterpillar of a mind that they are carefully preening into a beautiful butterfly. Onto this mind we pile on the pressure of studies, the screaming of parents, the bullying of peers (who are facing the same demons), and all the bling and marketing in the world. The 13 year old genetic male mind is programmed to leave home, but yours is staying put; that itself is worthy of love and respect.
Many don't stay, as the back-alleys and railway platforms of Indian cities bear witness to. And yet, it is a miracle that most of these abused and abandoned young men are not turning into serial killers or rapists. Inside of their minds, without help from adults, they train themselves every day to be decent, hard working men.
If you want to build a better world, let a teenager know that they are loved and accepted. That they are amazing just the way they are. That it is OK to have strange thoughts inside of them. That they should not hate themselves because of new feelings that they (as yet) have no control over. That as long as they know right from wrong, and do not let bad ideas translate into action, they are fine. You do this, and they will hopefully not grow up into adults who need help and counselling to accept themselves.
I'm sure girls go through equally tough times. But I have no lived experience of womanhood. From what I've heard from friends who've shared, while men are about power through strength, women are about power through control. That desire to control can turn their young mind towards constant manipulation, while a lack of control can lead to lifelong insecurities. Eventually all of this can be dealt with at the right time by constantly reassuring girls, telling them that they are loved, accepted and beautiful.
(Disclaimer: This is a weekend brain-fart. I have not studied psychology, leave alone child psychology. I have never even read one of those pop self help books like Men are from Mars. All of what I say is based on my own observations, conversations, deductions. In other words, these are the musings of a random dude on the Internet.)
Christianity, a European enterprise, propagates a white Adam and Eve. The white race needs the world to believe that the white man is the fount of all great things. They want you to believe that Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jew 2,000 years ago, was white.
The truth of course is that all of our ancestors are black. The purpose of the Christian religion, like any religion, is to empower a certain set of people. Start crucifying a brown Jesus in churches, and depicting black Adam and Eve, and that purpose falls apart.
I read recently that the state of Maharashtra has imposed time limits on online classes for children, that are as low as one hour a day.
Can people not differentiate between playing Candy Crush on a mobile screen and studying using a desktop monitor? This is hysteria and nothing else. A computer display provides a reading surface that is larger, and the font bigger, than a book. Then what is the problem?
Indian women have internalised servitude and find their life's purpose in serving others. Many can't seem to tell the difference between preparing a meal and serving it like a servant.
It's like how the poor and lower castes have internalised their position in our households. Sitting on the floor. Leaving their footwear outside. Using a separate set of utensils to drink and eat.
Instead of enlightening these people, we are removing chapters from school books on rights.
What absolutely brilliant sense of humour. He is seeing all this injustice around him, and he is angry, but he isn't angry on TV. He is funny, and yet hitting white racism hard. This. This is what you do with your stardom. You lead your people into the light. You don't hog hospital beds while the poor suffer. You serve with joy and humour.
"I shall be live on News 18 UP UK ( Channel number 1104 on Tata Sky) today on 12th July 2020 evening 2.48 pm talking about reason for current pandemic, date for its end, how industry will be during and post pandemic along with possible astrological remedies."
Received on a WhatsApp group of tech entrepreneurs in NCR.
I'm sorry. Do I hurt your feelings when I make fun of the sick? Well this man literally endangered millions of lives by encouraging the quack cure of homeopathy for a serious disease like COVID-19.
Homeopathy is not real medicine. Your beliefs and faith in it are of no value. Only facts matter in medicine. Don't tell me science doesn't yet understand homeopathy but Hahnemann had दिव्या दृष्टि and could see what electron microscopes can't.
I made a post just now, sharing my dear friend @[636590252:2048:Barry]'s music video.
I literally, only went through the JEE process so I could go to college with people like Barry. Between finishing school in 1997 and joining IIT Madras in 1998, I had found admission in the Civil Engineering course at what is now NIT Bhopal. I would have been perfectly happy living in Bhopal as a day scholar and attending college, were it not for the fact that the place had hardly any co-curricular activities.
So JEE was my ticket out of Bhopal, to place where I could do wonderful things. And I daresay I made full use of the opportunity Chennai and IIT presented to me, splitting my time between volunteering, cultural activities, making friends and geeking out.
Earlier today I was party to one of the regular gatherings the children's school organises - the school teachers, management and parents get together as a community and discuss the school's present and future. When asked what I want from my children, I said "I want them to be self confident, self aware. And with due respect to what the school does for them, I want them to know that college, career, school - this does not make them. It only adds to who they already are." To this Manit said that I hope I remember this as the kids progress to higher grades.
It's true. We all change colour when our kids get to grade 11. Life suddenly becomes all about college admissions. But I am writing this post so I can share with you that I was not made by my college. This might help those around you who are struggling with academics. And it will serve as a reminder if I were push my own kids hard.
Some of you are surprised that Kavin is already programming. I was lucky enough to start even earlier, at the age of 8, on a ZX Spectrum. But I honestly didn't enjoy programming as much as I enjoyed systems work.
I discovered Linux in the year 1996, when I was in grade 11. By then I had replaced a Novell Netware RPL remote boot network with diskless Windows 3.11 PCs connected to a Windows server. Slackware helped me replace that server with Samba. But the funnest part about Slackware was that I could recompile the kernel from scratch, with changes.
It's 2020 and nothing has changed. I still boot Linux on all kinds of weird processors. This week I've fiddled with booting the kernel in FIPS mode in AWS. Earlier this year, when I wanted to understand AWS CloudWatch better, I set up https://meet.thinvent.in. I now use CloudWatch to monitor all kinds of cloud based systems.
It's always been this way. I do some projects on the side to learn about new technologies. And very soon I am able to plough that learning back into work and earn 💰. College did not teach me Linux. On the flip side, I was able to use Linux to become the system administrator for my entire department in the second year itself. I had access to hundreds of computers and all kinds of labs. In grade 12 I had learnt C programming, and that helped me build fantastic projects in college and after. Between clearing JEE and joining IIT, I learnt Java, which later helped me get selected for a summer internship at the MIT Media Lab.
All this didn't make academics any easier. I still struggled with the fact that IIT insisted on teaching high voltage engineering to a chap who had signed up for a five year course in communication systems. I got top grade in subjects I liked or which required lab-work, and barely scraped through courses that had no bearing with communications.
Some people like me find their calling early. Some people don't. Either way, college doesn't make anybody. College gives you a degree, and degrees are of some use in getting a job. But college does not prepare you for work life. Destroying your childhood and school life over college makes very little sense.
So I encourage parents to live in the moment. For kids, having a marketable skill early on in life gives them perspective. In 1995, I made ₹3,000 over a weekend doing graphics designing for a book. That's about ₹18,000 in today's money. Right then, I realised, making money is easy. It is just about being at the right place at the right time with the right skill. From then on, I wanted to do bigger things than just earn money.
If you master the art of acquiring skills on your own, you never have to be dependent on a particular job, industry or economy. Over the course of my life I've learnt to use a hundred different software, from SolidWorks to KiCAD to CorelDraw. If my current industry melted, I could just as easily be a full time draftsman, graphics designer or web developer, or even a driver or electrician.
Anyway. I'm rambling. Be like Barry. He turned his childhood passion for music and dance into a lifelong pursuit. His full time job is in software and he is very good at what he does. He would take us all to watch the latest movies, and now his blog about movies is one of the top ten blogs in the world. And literally none of these successes can be traced back to his four years getting a degree in Mechanical Engineering at IIT Madras. Find passions and pursue them with love. Success will follow. Or not. Success isn't important. Happiness is. Be like Barry. He is always happy.
The first step to fixing something is to recognise that it is broken. Indian cultural and religious practices have problems. Let's admit to our problems rather than pointing fingers at other religions, countries, cultures. We are collectively capable of looking away when food is poured on a deity even as millions go hungry.
As a vegetarian I find the ritual sacrifice of goats by Muslims hurtful. But I must grudgingly admit that after killing the poor thing, at least they eat it, and also feed others with it. In Hindu and Jain households, we ritually burn food in हवनs, or put it in front of a deity and let it rot. Our children watch and internalise this practice.
But change is possible. In many households it is considered acceptable to give food to a poor person instead of burning it, putting it in front of a deity, or feeding a priest. Why can't more of us be like this. What exactly are we achieving by burning ghee or edible oil in a lamp?
110 died on trains. How many more must have died nameless on the streets and in their homes? And we don't even see figures. What a great cover-up of a mass genocide of the poor by the government through the sudden lockdown and subsequent police brutality.
I'm lying in bed right now, alone in my room, trying to fall asleep. I read this article. It made me contemplate if the supernatural is real, Greta Thunberg is a डायन, और उसकी हाय लगी सबको। Now I'm scared and all sleep is gone. Never let your imagination run amok at bedtime. All I can think of is डायनs, दाकिनीs and चांडालs. Somebody call me no.
Why we need strong vernacular education. If every learned epidemiologist in India only spoke English, and it was left to professional translators to translate what they are saying, where would we be? Scientists and educators needs to speak and write in all the living languages of the nation, not just English and Hindi.
बात ऊपर से सुन कर सही लगती है इनकी। मगर गौर करने की बात यह है कि इस देश में minorities ही आगे हैं - पारसी, जैन, ब्राह्मण, अशरफ, बनिया और खत्री सिख। और majority पीछे थीं, हैं, और रहेंगी भी - बहुजन, पसमांदा, दलित, अधिवासी।
हुकूमत अशरफों ने की, पिछड़े पसमांदा रह गए। इसलिए धर्म से ना बाटें, कि मुसलमानों ने राज भी किया और अब स्पेशल स्टैटस भी चाहिए। विभाजन जाति से करें, तो देखेंगे कि अशरफों ब्राह्मणों राजपूतों ने मिल कर राज किया, और किसी ने अपने धर्म के पिछड़ों के लिए कुछ ना किया। और जिसने किया उसने सिर्फ अपने धर्म की पिछड़ों के लिए नहीं किया, ब्लकि सभी पिछड़ों के लिए किया।
Evidence that the school system in India just crams an unnecessary amount of junk into children's heads. Further exacerbating the centuries old divides between upper and lower caste/class. Any child interested in taking up a skill based vocation just isn't going to have the patience to deal with that much bullshit - which explains our high rate of dropouts after grades 5 and 8. For those who stick on, cramming all this crap requires a fantastic support system at home and in school. All this leads to admissions to coveted publicly funded universities being heavily skewed in favour of the urban middle and upper classes.
30% of the syllabus is just easily dispensable! Take history. Romila Thapar has single handedly murdered a love for history amongst generations of Indians. The level of unnecessary detail in NCERT history books from grades 6 to 10, with a complete lack of big picture analysis of "what the heck is going on here". History without storytelling; just an endless stream of events and facts.
My children have the privilege and good fortune of studying under an international board. The focus is on skills and learning; outcomes, if you will. Nilay recently interacted with a friend studying in a regular Indian school, under an Indian board, similar grade level. He was taken aback. Its just more and more syllabus. Mountains of it. But what is the child learning and retaining? Where are the skills? Where is the time to chew on what you've learnt, apply it to life.
All of May, Kavin and I were hounded by Nilay. Same question every day, "When am I ever going to come across a trapezoid in real life? Why do I need to know how to calculate it's area." He now realises that in the CBSE ocean, the trapezoid is but one meaningless drop.
इस देश में कृष्णमूर्ति और विवेकानंद बोल बोल के थक मर गए। Efforts have been made, from नई तालीम to NIOS, but nothing makes the all powerful CBSE, ICSE and state boards budge. After all, a simplification of education would open the floodgates to college education for everybody. The boards are the gatekeepers. The UP board used to pride itself in being idiotically hard to pass; I don't know what the situation is these days.
Me: Wow. You look beautiful. Living in the mountains has done you wonders.
She: Hardly. I'm tanned from being in the sun.
Me: Your skin is glowing.
She: I'm outdoor so much. Its not good for my skin.
Me: I've lived in Chennai five years. You can't tell me beauty comes from your skin tone.
Renaming Fair and Lovely won't help. We need to send everybody to South India or Africa for retraining. So they can (re)learn what beauty really is. Weight and complexion have dominated the conversation on beauty for too long.
Meanwhile, बड़े नवाब has made this lighting fixture using reclaimed wood and some old wires, and lighting fixtures that had come out of our old office.
I know a couple of you expressed interest in buying them over WhatsApp. He is happy to make some for you. Comment here if interested. He needs any excuse to use power tools again.
Kavin comes to me and hits his head with a mallet, then laughs merrily.
Kavin: This mallet is very malletey.
Me: I know the feeling. I've been coding for 32 years.
Kavin: I'm going to sleep now.
Last night I found him missing from bed. He was at his PC, coding. I told him it's past midnight and he was surprised. He went back to bed immediately.
He is self motivated, I've never asked him to code. He discovered JS courses on Khan Academy and started making games and math puzzles. I'm not sure how to react to the situation. Am I supposed to moderate him? What do you think?
He of course shouldn't be working past midnight and that was just one-off. Sometimes you just can't catch any sleep when there's a bug in your code (those who code know the feeling).
