Dr. Abdul Kalam's Letter to Every Indian

Dr. Abdul Kalam's Letter to Every Indian

Why is the media here so negative?

Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements?
We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?

We are the first in milk production.
We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.
We are the second largest producer of wheat.
We are the second largest producer of rice.

Look at Dr. Sudarshan , he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.

I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.. Why are we so NEGATIVE? Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign T.Vs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology.

Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance? I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is. She replied: I want to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to build this developed India. You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation.

Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengeance.

Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read; otherwise, choice is yours..

YOU say that our government is inefficient.
YOU say that our laws are too old.
YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage.
YOU say that the phones don't work, the railways are a joke. The airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination.
YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits.

YOU say, say and say. What do YOU do about it?

Take a person on his way to Singapore. Give him a name - 'YOURS'. Give him a face - 'YOURS'. YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best. In Singapore you don't throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores. YOU are as proud of their Underground links as they are. You pay $5 (approx. Rs. 60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or Pedder Road) between 5 PM and 8 PM. YOU come back to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity. In Singapore you don't say anything, DO YOU? YOU wouldn't dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai. YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah.
YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds (Rs.650) a month to, 'see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else. 'YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, 'Jaanta hai main kaun hoon (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so's son. Take your two bucks and get lost.' YOU wouldn't chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand ..
Why don't YOU spit Paan on the streets of Tokyo ? Why don't YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston ??? We are still talking of the same YOU. YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India ?

In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan ..
Will the Indian citizen do that here?' He's right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility.
We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick a up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms.

We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity. This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public.

When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women, dowry, girl child! and others, we make loud drawing room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? 'It's the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons' rights to a dowry.' So who's going to change the system?

What does a system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbours, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr.Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away.

Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England . When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money.

Dear Indians, The article is highly thought inductive, calls for a great deal of introspection and pricks one's conscience too.. I am echoing J. F. Kennedy's words to his fellow Americans to relate to Indians...

'ASK WHAT WE CAN DO FOR INDIA AND DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE TO MAKE INDIA WHAT AMERICA AND OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES ARE TODAY'

Lets do what India needs from us.

Forward this mail to each Indian for a change instead of sending Jokes or junk mails.

Thank you,

Dr.. Abdul Kalam

This message is very old (around 1 yr back). But i can see the media pressure building upon common wealth games. This might make them remember something.

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How Facebook is taking over our lives

President Obama used it to get elected. Dell will recruit new hires with it. Microsoft's new operating system borrows from it. No question, Facebook has friends in high places. Can CEO Mark Zuckerberg make those connections pay off?

Facebook held no appeal for Peter Lichtenstein. The New Paltz, N.Y., resident had checked out so-called social networking sites before, and he wasn't impressed. ("MySpace," he recalls, "was ridiculous.")

A chiropractor and acupuncturist, Lichtenstein was already a member of a few professional web-based user groups. The last thing he needed was another message box to check.

Then a buddy posted a link to photos from a trip to Thailand and India on his Facebook page and flatly refused to distribute them any other way. The friend's assumption: Duh - everyone's on Facebook.

And so Lichtenstein, 57, recently became an official member of the Facebook army, 175 million strong and, Facebook says, growing at the astounding rate of about five million new users a week, making it a rare bright spot in a dismal economy. If Facebook were a country, it would have a population nearly as large as Brazil's. It even edges out the U.S. television audience for Super Bowl XLIII, which drew a record-setting 152 million eyeballs.

But these days the folks fervently updating their Facebook pages aren't just tech-savvy kids: The college and post-college crowd the site originally aimed to serve (18- to 24-year-olds) now makes up less than a quarter of users. The newest members - the ones behind Facebook's accelerating growth rate - are more, ahem, mature types like Lichtenstein, who never thought they'd have the time or inclination to overshare on the web. It's just that Facebook has finally started to make their busy lives a little more productive - and a lot more fun.

Try logging in to quickly check a message, and you may find yourself scrolling through new baby photos from that guy who used to sit next to you in Mr. Peterson's English class. How did such a goofball end up with such a cute baby? And how'd he find you here anyhow? Soon you're checking the friends you have in common. This addictive quality keeps Facebook's typical user on the site for an average of 169 minutes a month, according to ComScore. Compare that with Google News, where the average reader spends 13 minutes a month checking up on the world, or the New York Times website, which holds on to readers for a mere ten minutes a month.

The "stickiness" of the site is a key part of 24-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg's original plan to build an online version of the relationships we have in real life. Offline we bump into friends and end up talking for hours. We flip through old photos with our family. We join clubs. Facebook lets us do all that in digital form. Yet we also present different faces to the different people in our lives: An "anything goes" page we share with pals might not be appropriate for office mates - or for the moms and grandmas who increasingly are joining the site. Basic privacy controls today allow users to share varying degrees of information with friends, but when I recently met with Zuckerberg in Palo Alto, he waxed philosophical about eventually giving a user the ability to have a different Facebook personality for each Facebook friendship, a sort of online version of the line from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": "I contain multitudes."

His ultimate goal is less poetic - and perhaps more ambitious: to turn Facebook into the planet's standardized communication (and marketing) platform, as ubiquitous and intuitive as the telephone but far more interactive, multidimensional - and indispensable. Your Facebook ID quite simply will be your gateway to the digital world, Zuckerberg predicts. "We think that if you can build one worldwide platform where you can just type in anyone's name, find the person you're looking for, and communicate with them," he told a German audience in January, "that's a really valuable system to be building."

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Satyam customers warned to expect disruption

Analysts are warning Satyam's customers to prepare themselves against the risk of disruption of services from the troubled outsourcer.

It follows last week's admission by Satyam's founder and former chairman B Ramalinga Raju that its books had been inflated by nearly $1bn (£700m).

Analyst group Gartner warned that the ensuing investigation will hamper Satyam's ability to invest in client engagement, staff development and R&D and risks driving staff out of the company, limiting its attractiveness as a IT services vendor.

Gartner recommends that companies closely monitor their contracts with Satyam for disruption, prepare contingency measures and offer "retention bonuses" to keep key Satyam staff on critical projects.

The note said: "In the current economic environment, enterprises consider financial indiscretions by any business intolerable; we believe this will severely handicap Satyam when prospective customers are evaluating potential partners."

Satyam's clients include household names such as BBC Worldwide, Birds Eye Iglo Group, Fifa, General Electric and Nestlé.

A spokesman for Nestlé said it had assurances from Satyam over the continuation of its service but added it is examining its options: "Nestlé's own internal resources are in a position to provide the company with the necessary IT support.

"Alternative solutions are being considered and no disruption of Nestlé's IT operations is expected."

A spokesman for BBC Worldwide, which worked with Satyam on its BBC Blast VJ Masher video portal for young people and has an ongoing services contract with the outsourcer, said: "There is only a very small amount of work being carried out at this present time, which is reaching a natural conclusion, unconnected with recent events.

"If we were to enter into any future contract of work with Satyam we would obviously apply the appropriate due diligence and contractual terms to protect BBC Worldwide."

Fifa said it is "monitoring the situation relating to Satyam", which is the IT services provider for the 2010 and 2014 Fifa World Cups and two Confederation Cups.

Speaking from Satyam's headquarters in Hyderabad today, senior Indian banker and new Satyam board member Deepak Parekh said that on paper the company has enough money coming in to cover its debts but admitted that at the moment "nobody knows these numbers are correct".

Parekh said in the coming days the board will appoint accountants to verify the figures and go back over the firm's books for the past two or three years. "We have triple A clients and can request them to pay early rather than waiting 60 days.

"The company has a large amount of receivables due and the debt due is low so there is adequate liquidity but we need to get these figures verified."

Parekh added that the company may also ask for more time to state its third quarter results.

The company's shares jumped to end the day more than 40 percent up at 34.40 rupees (47 pence).

Parekh and two other senior figures were appointed to Satyam's board by the Indian government after it sacked the previous board on Friday.

There has also been much speculation about whether Satyam could be taken over or merge with another organisation, such as one of the other large Indian outsourcers.

But Manish Dugar, chief financial officer of one of the largest Indian outsourcers, Wipro, played down suggestions that it could be among the companies looking to take over Satyam. He said the two companies were so similar, any deal would be hampered by a doubling up of departments across the new organisation.

Dugar told ZDNet UK's sister site, silicon.com: "If you look at the business of Satyam and Wipro we are more or less comparable in service, the size, the kind of work that we do, customer base, etc. It is complementary but I don't know how synergistic it would be, because if we are out there doing something where they are then one plus one becomes 11."

Credit: Satyam customers told: Batten down the hatches from silicon.com

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Give free food with one click.

Bhookh.com

Objective
To provide, using the Internet, staple food to chronically hungry Indians so as to enable them to survive, learn and work.


It actually isn't a cup of rice they donate........not an actual cup anyway. its not a scam. there are anganwadis all over the country, where kids are given food free of charge. it is called a mid-day meal program which is a part of one of the nutritional programs of India. In this, they buy a meal which is rich in protein, calories, and vitamins.

bhookh.com just sponsors these meals and make sure that it reaches the anganwadi for free, instead of getting lost in the process of reaching these places due to politics and all that jazz............

so no it is not a scam.

and even it was, how does it hurt us to just click on a website everyday? its not as if we are paying for anything except maybe a few extra seconds of our time...........a few extra seconds which would have gone into looking up another useless website.

feel proud for clicking it at least once.
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