Madam President

Pratibha Patil is the new President of India, As I watched the debate on CNN-IBN I could not help but notice a larger issue we Indians have missed in this whole election drama.

The issue is, in this election we have put an end to an admirable convention of electing a non-partisan,non-political president.

The convention started with Kalam who turned out to be a fantastic "People's president", I think credit for starting this convention should have gone to NDA who made his presidency possible.

Sadly the Congress party and their left allies were in no such mood and decided to elect a political rubber stamp like Ms Patil.

Amit Verma of livemint has written a very humorous sarcastic article, Even though some of the comments seems to be below the belt, Amit Verma represents the desperate feelings of a growing educated class who have been left with very little say in the political system of the country.

Of "Passport Baba" and "VISA Balaji"

Among the day's idiotic stories, there was this story in ET about one "Passport Baba", where hundreds of people come and tie their passports to the old pipal tree in the hopes of hitting foreign shores!

When I told of this to a friend, he told me about "VISA Balaji" where people converge for divine intervention into their VISA approval process... and it is supposed to work!

I guess India doesn't need its own parody newspaper like "The Onion", since the regular stories and events themselves are so much amusing and resemble parody :-)

Charlie Rose

Charlie Rose is a popular american journalist, recently he has put up thousand of hours of his one-to-one interviews on his website (http://charlierose.com) for free viewing.

This is a great source of watching online interviews with people from so many diverse backgrounds.

I have watched the following interviews till now:

With Warren Buffett:



With Susan Buffett:


With Geroge Bush:

Food for thought - President Clinton

A fantastic interview with president Clinton at the Aspen idea festival, here is the link.

In the hour long interview Clinton throws some interesting and amazing facts in a very eloquent way, a few of them here:

1. Interdependence: Today we are more interdependent on each other than any time in the past, Interdependence as compared to globalisation, covers the a far wide spectrum than just economics.

2. The issue of identity and the roots of terrorism: Clinton gives the example of the recent bombing attempts in London to argue that real root of terrorism is actually the issue of identity, among people who seem to have lost it and don't feel part of the mainstream even after living for many years in an alien land. For this he says the world needs to be far more open to other cultures and people.

3. The new "IT boom": Clinton attributes the huge growth in average American incomes of the 90s to the Information technology boom, he goes on to say that a developed country like US needs a new wave like IT every 6-8 yrs to sustain the income growth and to keep the wide economic inequality in check.
He suggests wide and far reaching investments and initiatives in controlling green house gases across America, This he suggests will serve to create millions of new jobs and strengthening of middle class.
Now this is some innovative thinking, but then the new jobs this proposed wave can generate will be low end jobs as compared to the IT boom. This will help the lower middle class Americans but its hard to conceive of it as the panacea of all ills.

4. On the Israel-Palestine conflict Clinton views are that if this issue is resolved half the problem of islamic terrorism will be solved and the region can emerge into new powerhouse of the middle east.

Unfortunately, given the recent developments in the Palestine, this seems highly unlikely anytime soon.

Nehru - A man of letters

A new book of Nehru's writings has come out: 'The Oxford India Nehru'.

I just read its review on livemint.com and decided to include it in my "To be read" list of books.

Like zillions of Indians I have always admired Nehru for his great vision and leadership of the country, true he also made some mistakes but then who doesn't!

His books, 'Discovery of India', 'Glimpses of world history' are masterpieces written from jail.

and these lines are just wonderful:

“A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

from his historical speech "Tryst with destiny".

Musharraf interview

Over the past few weeks, Stories coming in from pakistan have been pretty significant. I've been following them closely with dawn.

Just watching this 'family' interview of Mush, the interview opens with Mush saying:

The biggest quality of us (he and his family) is our humility

How humble of him :-)

Below is the interview, Mush stumbles and stammers as usual, still pretty interesting, gives some peep into the lives of him and his family.

Incredible India - not so incredible response :-)

The ministry of tourism, Govt of India has launched a wonderful website for the Incredible India campaign.

Even though this might sound like a crazy idea to most Indians, I thought of giving them feedback. Here is the email I tried to send them:

From: Abhinav Bhatnagar <masked masked >
Date: Jul 7, 2007 8:50 PM
Subject: Feedback on incredibleindia.org
To: contactus@incredibleindia.org

Dear Sir/Madam,

At the onset, let me take the opportunity to congratulate Ministry of Tourism, India for the wonderful "Incredible India" campaign.

The website http://www.incredibleindia.org provides a wealth of information and is beautifully designed. Being an Indian currently residing abroad I felt proud of this website.

I was impressed by the fact that the website is available in four languages. Hindi, Chinese, French and Japanese. I am sure efforts would be underway from your end to provide the site in other languages (particularly european ones) as well.

Being from IT background and having experience in website designing, I could not help but notice a few areas of improvement, I have listed them below:

1. Out of curiosity, when I selected the chinese option on the website, I was presented with a warning message from the Google desktop search program which I have on my machine. Please see the screen shot in attachment.















2. Broken links:

• On the information page for sikkim the following two links are broken:

http://sikkim.nic.ind
http://www.sikkimtourism.org

• On the information page for Uttaranchal the following link is broken: http://www.ua.nic.in/uttaranchaltourism
  

• Mizorum information page: http://mizotourism.nic.in/
  

3. The home page have some irrelevant links from the point of view of a tourist for example "Entrance test for guide training course etc" these links can be instead moved to a separate section; something like a new section for Administrative matters etc.

These are just some of the improvements which can be made to make the website more user friendly. Ideas can be taken from certain other websites.

There are many other creative things which can be done, for example the TV ad campaign videos can be made available on the website, they can also posted on popular video sharing sites such as Youtube.com, video publicity over Internet can provide huge viral marketing gains at a very nominal costs.

Excuse me for the long email, I will conclude this here congratulating you once again.

Thanks and Regards,
Abhinav

Obviously I was trying to help them here, however when the email bounced from their servers with the message "User mailbox exceeds allowed size: contactus@incredibleindia.org"

Perplexed, I looked up another email address from the site but same result:

"User mailbox exceeds allowed size: webmaster@incredibleindia.org"

anybody reading this has any idea what could be done? , I feel that I justed wasted half an hour typing that mail.