The team from Sugathi that has gone to Ananya on 26th Jan,2008 comprised Pardha , Gunashekar , Pavan , Kishore ,Venk (Our Venkata Sunil), Srinivas( Srinath's colleague a new face in Sugathi's core team ) , Aparna & myself.
Actually the day started quite early for me as I reached there an hour before the other guyz ,who got delayed at the bakery. I was lucky to be entertained with a good session of cricket. I was mesmerized at the way these kids batted and fielded and the way one of those kids displayed good footwork and this shows how technically somebody could learn and improve by just watching the television.
Then Uddhav came along and started talking about the day's agenda. As we ran through the agenda, topics changed and the conversation widened , then he started telling me about a session he attended a week earlier where "how NGOs need to raise money" was discussed at length. The session it seems has not given a straight cut answer to the question but it has instituted the process of thinking in everyone's brain. This goes to suggest what a big and attractive sector the Social Service has become, how else could there be so much analysis done on something that doesnt fetch profits? We see a paradigm change in this sector. TISS is now one of the hottest colleges in India for an MBA. On a lighter note he said that he respected the decision of our stopping to donate money to Ananya but said that if the same was today he would have taken steps to prevent our withdrawing as an assignment to the discussion that happened.
The kids have taken part in the Mumbai Marathon which has been in the news recently thanks to stars like John Abraham , Bipasha Basu . One of those kids ran for 17.5 kms in 1hr45mins. Uddhav also ran (I mean walked) in the marathon. This was one of their efforts to raise money.
The rest of the team then arrived and we started to get on with the rest of the activities that were planned for the day.
The theme for the day was " Science " and for demonstrating that we had the children of the school divide into their groups and each group was supposed to draw or paint or make a model of any science topic that they could come up with and explain the process behind it to the whole class and us(Sugathi members).
We and the class were asked to put forth our questions and the questions were to be answered by the respective teams.
There were 5 groups in all and the topics that were demonstrated are : -
1) Digestive System
2) Respiratory System
3) A Butterfly's metamorphosis
4) Photosynthesis
5) A fatory's living model
All the groups were very innovative. We could see creativity oozing out from the brains of the kids in the form of using baloons to resemble the stomach, liver etc and pasting sand on paper to denote the size of the food particles that enter the intestines etc. One of the groups even had a demonstration in an interactive manner ,
where one of the members of their team asked a question and another answered it , this way they made sure the demonstration was more interactive than how it would be in a regular presentation.
Finally when it was our time to show them something we demonstrated the Newton's Third Law - "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction". We blowed up a baloon and stuck it in the direction of the exhaust of a small car and when we let loose of the baloon the car moved in the forward direction which was a result of the thrust created by the air rushing out of the baloon.
With this came to an end an activity which can easily be touted the best and the most challenging activity conducted by Sugathi at Ananya to date. The key to this is that it could focus on enhancing the expressive talent of the kids. We as a team should definitely be proud of the way the activity has gone by . 3 cheers once again to Sugathi . Hip , hip , hurrah!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hope Sugathi does many more activities of such kind.
Please find the pictures of the :-
http://picasaweb.google.com/sugathi4all/ScienceFairAtAnanya26thJan08
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Thursday, February 15, 2007
OpenSourcing a boon or bane
The whole world is stepping on the gas searching for every nook and corner that could possibly help in finding a vent for progress , one major contributor to this has been opensourcing . Be it technology, knowledge and flow of information , opensourcing does have a significant contribution . But the question really is , is it helpful or is it harmful . The rest of the blog shall give my 2 pence about opensourcing.
OpenSourcing is a concept which refers to improvization of any product by getting contributed from people who not only make it , but also use it. It was introduced in the software sector by NetScape in 1998 in an attempt to improvize the performance of the Navigator( The first web browser) and make it more secure. Typically in a software industry the code is shared along with the executable , and any user whosoever feels the need , can change it and send it back to the principal coders and they after reviewing the change would add the name of the user to the list of source coders. In return these source coders also get a share (this is not mandatory , some can really be free of cost and some rewards are trivial) of the earnings of the product. This we all know , but what are the real goods and bads about it?
The goods :- There is a philosophy that is beleived by people of the likes of Linus Torvalds(developer of Linux Kernel) and Richard Stallman(founder of GNU ),that knowledge belongs to the world and that whatever is absorbed from it should rightly go back to it and so outsourcing is regarded by these people as a tribute to whatever they could learn from the world . Thomas L Friedman in his book "The World is Flat" considers opensourcing as a major falttener of the world because the source is shared back and forth crossing boundaries and making the world a small place where a person sitting in India could contribute to the code written by some other person in North America. Did u know that Wikipedia is an opensourced free online encylcopedia and it is far more famous than the priced Brittanica's encyclopedia. GNU the mother of Linux is a free operating system and has a vast number of contributors making it the most robust operating system in the world ( Security wise experts say Linux is 8/10 while Windows is 4/10). GDB is the best debugger that is available today which is also opensource. The key attribute here is the quality of the product that is presented to the world. It is an unstated fact that the developer can not look at the various angles of a product which become the key during deployment . This major obstacle is blown off by OpenSourcing coz the deployers get to modify the code.
Another wonderful aspect about this is ,it contributes to global integrity. Let me give an example to get this idea more transparent. We enjoy company of our friends so much , frankly speaking the thrill that I got in working towards making one of our pal the prez at our college is uncomparable , atleast not with the feel that i get when i go out with our team for a lunch. Why ? Differences , no because two individuals are bound to have differences, we all did have differences , but we did love them and enjoy them as well. The key to this feeling is that , in the office we work on a profit motive , to earn money and make a living but there back in college, we did it for the love of ourselves, because we loved the company of each other and we did want to have an identity of a group that had the best time in our college. Similar is the feeling with these geeks , they do feel a spirit in being a part of the best product in the world ,and making it free adds to the reputation . They have a feeling , for all that mother earth has given us we are giving this wonderful peace in return.
he Wall Street Journal , composed and edited by the best brains is suffering a setback in the income because of blogging ? Blogs are getting more popular because they provide views of the common man and more because they add specifics to detail, and this is because a lot of people post their views on the same topic.
The bads:- As every coin has two faces so does OpenSourcing. This side has the support of people who have been extraordinarily successful in making money , people of the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates , who strongly believe that a human is maximum motivated by the lowest part of the Malsow's heirarchy of needs triangle,physiological needs. The ideology is that man is best motivated by money , so if the activity of opensourcing happens for free ( as it does in most of the cases) the drive for those geeks who try to improvize the performance is lost. They beleive that research that is put in for developing a software ,costs millions of rupees and inorder to keep the wheel moving , a pure passion towards global integrity and self actualization would not suffice in funding research , only money would. They see the open sourcing industry as a threat to them that is unethical , because they clearly know if a common man gets to know that there is a pdf reader that is capable of all the functions of Adobe Acrobat Reader for free , who would want to buy the licensed version that costs quite some money?
Both the sides have equally valid points and it is really very tough to support one view. What if , the issue is a little more complicated ,what if the definition of opensource be changed from the monetary angle , what if it was reframed to be a software which is priced ,nothing else changed ? Well that would certainly counter the main criticism that OpenSource is currently facing but feasibility of this new proposition is yet another thing that ties the bird's wings down.
OpenSourcing is a concept which refers to improvization of any product by getting contributed from people who not only make it , but also use it. It was introduced in the software sector by NetScape in 1998 in an attempt to improvize the performance of the Navigator( The first web browser) and make it more secure. Typically in a software industry the code is shared along with the executable , and any user whosoever feels the need , can change it and send it back to the principal coders and they after reviewing the change would add the name of the user to the list of source coders. In return these source coders also get a share (this is not mandatory , some can really be free of cost and some rewards are trivial) of the earnings of the product. This we all know , but what are the real goods and bads about it?
The goods :- There is a philosophy that is beleived by people of the likes of Linus Torvalds(developer of Linux Kernel) and Richard Stallman(founder of GNU ),that knowledge belongs to the world and that whatever is absorbed from it should rightly go back to it and so outsourcing is regarded by these people as a tribute to whatever they could learn from the world . Thomas L Friedman in his book "The World is Flat" considers opensourcing as a major falttener of the world because the source is shared back and forth crossing boundaries and making the world a small place where a person sitting in India could contribute to the code written by some other person in North America. Did u know that Wikipedia is an opensourced free online encylcopedia and it is far more famous than the priced Brittanica's encyclopedia. GNU the mother of Linux is a free operating system and has a vast number of contributors making it the most robust operating system in the world ( Security wise experts say Linux is 8/10 while Windows is 4/10). GDB is the best debugger that is available today which is also opensource. The key attribute here is the quality of the product that is presented to the world. It is an unstated fact that the developer can not look at the various angles of a product which become the key during deployment . This major obstacle is blown off by OpenSourcing coz the deployers get to modify the code.
Another wonderful aspect about this is ,it contributes to global integrity. Let me give an example to get this idea more transparent. We enjoy company of our friends so much , frankly speaking the thrill that I got in working towards making one of our pal the prez at our college is uncomparable , atleast not with the feel that i get when i go out with our team for a lunch. Why ? Differences , no because two individuals are bound to have differences, we all did have differences , but we did love them and enjoy them as well. The key to this feeling is that , in the office we work on a profit motive , to earn money and make a living but there back in college, we did it for the love of ourselves, because we loved the company of each other and we did want to have an identity of a group that had the best time in our college. Similar is the feeling with these geeks , they do feel a spirit in being a part of the best product in the world ,and making it free adds to the reputation . They have a feeling , for all that mother earth has given us we are giving this wonderful peace in return.
he Wall Street Journal , composed and edited by the best brains is suffering a setback in the income because of blogging ? Blogs are getting more popular because they provide views of the common man and more because they add specifics to detail, and this is because a lot of people post their views on the same topic.
The bads:- As every coin has two faces so does OpenSourcing. This side has the support of people who have been extraordinarily successful in making money , people of the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates , who strongly believe that a human is maximum motivated by the lowest part of the Malsow's heirarchy of needs triangle,physiological needs. The ideology is that man is best motivated by money , so if the activity of opensourcing happens for free ( as it does in most of the cases) the drive for those geeks who try to improvize the performance is lost. They beleive that research that is put in for developing a software ,costs millions of rupees and inorder to keep the wheel moving , a pure passion towards global integrity and self actualization would not suffice in funding research , only money would. They see the open sourcing industry as a threat to them that is unethical , because they clearly know if a common man gets to know that there is a pdf reader that is capable of all the functions of Adobe Acrobat Reader for free , who would want to buy the licensed version that costs quite some money?
Both the sides have equally valid points and it is really very tough to support one view. What if , the issue is a little more complicated ,what if the definition of opensource be changed from the monetary angle , what if it was reframed to be a software which is priced ,nothing else changed ? Well that would certainly counter the main criticism that OpenSource is currently facing but feasibility of this new proposition is yet another thing that ties the bird's wings down.
Monday, February 5, 2007
The Cauvery Tribunal
Whatz with the Cauvery issue ? Why is there a ruckus because of it ? What does it mean to the Tamilians and the Kannadigas.
The Cauvery tribunal was organized to create peace between the states that share the waters of the Cauvery namely Karnataka,TamilNadu, Kerala and Puducherry . The history of the dispute could be traced back to agreements that were formed in 1892 and 1924 which were biassed favouring the Madras Presidency ,leaving the princely state of Mysore in the lurch. Post Independence the Madras Presidency was split and Karnataka,TN formed independent states. The agreements always mandated each of these states to inform the rest incase a blockage was being constructed across the river. But from the 1930's despite the other's protests condemning the acts, dams started showing up in the name of storing water on the grounds that a lot of water was getting wasted due to evaporation which could be used during the drier days. Displeasure and discontent started burning in the hearts of the Tamilian farmers who relied on the river Cauvery because a lot of water was getting held up in Karnataka itself. Later on, during the Anna's (MGR's) era , the Tamilians strenghtened the reins and ordered for a review of the status of the river Cauvery. During the period(1924-1990) the agricultural area of Karnataka increased by more than 150% from 4.2 lack acres to 11.2 lack acres and that of TN grew from 24 to 28 lack acres. As time drew things into the 90's and as the governments were unable to acheive a consensus, a tribunal was formed which was aimed at acheiving one.
The tribunal released an interim award in 1990 which stated that Karnataka had to give 205 tmcft(thousand million cubic feet) at Mettur . During the last 16 years except the 4years of severe drought Karnataka released more than 192tmcft to Tamil Nadu.
The tribunal released yesterday forces Karnataka to release 192tmcft at the Billingudu gauging station which is upstream owing to which it loses a further 25tcmft(the volume of water between Billingudu and Mettur) . The tribunal has stuck by and large to the 1990 interim award which suggested Karnataka to release most of the water(180 tmcft) during the monsoon period ( Southwest monsoon June - September ,Northeast monsoon October - December) and a relatively lesser volume(12 tmcft) during the dry seasons( January - May) , during which many parts of the Cauvery dry up. However the critical period for the Tamilians is during the months of October to January ,during which studies claim, that better water supplies would increase the agriculutural output by a considerable proportion.
The 740tmcft of Cauvery water is shared across major states in the manner as the table suggests
State--------Verdict's share------Demanded Share
TamilNadu-----419------------------562
Karnataka-----270------------------465
Kerala--------30-------------------100
Puducherry----7--------------------30
The major argument of the Kannadigas is that the underground water table potential has been manipulated by the Tamilians to draw favour from the verdict . The United Nations Development Program released a report saying that the underground water table potential of 129 tmcft,but the reports that were submitted to the Tribunal were a meager 45tmcft.
Tamilians on the contrary won the argument by boasting the percentage share of their agricultural exports to the total agricultural exports of the country,which accordin to them should determine the share of the water. The major factor that skewed the argument their side was the large amount of land that is under cultivation in the state.
The Kannadigas are planning bundhs and rasta rokos of literally every god damn locomotive,on the other hand the Tamilians are rejoicing the result and everyone including the old man from the opposition Karunanidhi is going around saying justice has been done. There is a period of 90 days for either sides to come up with pleas and the Tribunal award shall be effective in a month's time.
The Cauvery tribunal was organized to create peace between the states that share the waters of the Cauvery namely Karnataka,TamilNadu, Kerala and Puducherry . The history of the dispute could be traced back to agreements that were formed in 1892 and 1924 which were biassed favouring the Madras Presidency ,leaving the princely state of Mysore in the lurch. Post Independence the Madras Presidency was split and Karnataka,TN formed independent states. The agreements always mandated each of these states to inform the rest incase a blockage was being constructed across the river. But from the 1930's despite the other's protests condemning the acts, dams started showing up in the name of storing water on the grounds that a lot of water was getting wasted due to evaporation which could be used during the drier days. Displeasure and discontent started burning in the hearts of the Tamilian farmers who relied on the river Cauvery because a lot of water was getting held up in Karnataka itself. Later on, during the Anna's (MGR's) era , the Tamilians strenghtened the reins and ordered for a review of the status of the river Cauvery. During the period(1924-1990) the agricultural area of Karnataka increased by more than 150% from 4.2 lack acres to 11.2 lack acres and that of TN grew from 24 to 28 lack acres. As time drew things into the 90's and as the governments were unable to acheive a consensus, a tribunal was formed which was aimed at acheiving one.
The tribunal released an interim award in 1990 which stated that Karnataka had to give 205 tmcft(thousand million cubic feet) at Mettur . During the last 16 years except the 4years of severe drought Karnataka released more than 192tmcft to Tamil Nadu.
The tribunal released yesterday forces Karnataka to release 192tmcft at the Billingudu gauging station which is upstream owing to which it loses a further 25tcmft(the volume of water between Billingudu and Mettur) . The tribunal has stuck by and large to the 1990 interim award which suggested Karnataka to release most of the water(180 tmcft) during the monsoon period ( Southwest monsoon June - September ,Northeast monsoon October - December) and a relatively lesser volume(12 tmcft) during the dry seasons( January - May) , during which many parts of the Cauvery dry up. However the critical period for the Tamilians is during the months of October to January ,during which studies claim, that better water supplies would increase the agriculutural output by a considerable proportion.
The 740tmcft of Cauvery water is shared across major states in the manner as the table suggests
State--------Verdict's share------Demanded Share
TamilNadu-----419------------------562
Karnataka-----270------------------465
Kerala--------30-------------------100
Puducherry----7--------------------30
The major argument of the Kannadigas is that the underground water table potential has been manipulated by the Tamilians to draw favour from the verdict . The United Nations Development Program released a report saying that the underground water table potential of 129 tmcft,but the reports that were submitted to the Tribunal were a meager 45tmcft.
Tamilians on the contrary won the argument by boasting the percentage share of their agricultural exports to the total agricultural exports of the country,which accordin to them should determine the share of the water. The major factor that skewed the argument their side was the large amount of land that is under cultivation in the state.
The Kannadigas are planning bundhs and rasta rokos of literally every god damn locomotive,on the other hand the Tamilians are rejoicing the result and everyone including the old man from the opposition Karunanidhi is going around saying justice has been done. There is a period of 90 days for either sides to come up with pleas and the Tribunal award shall be effective in a month's time.
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