Rumi Nations

I read one more article by one female about how women have the right to wear what they want, when they want, where they want, etc. I would love it if women wore revealing clothes whenever they were in a public place -- not merely skin-hugging tight jeans, but short , short skirts like those Hollywood celebs wear which reveal their panties intentionally or otherwise. The top of the dress should reveal good amount of the boobs as well or preferably have wardrobe malfunctions - manufactured or otherwise. Young good-looking women wearing these clothes should preferably visit areas of Delhi at 2 a.m. which are particularly untouched by the rule of law. May be they can have their grandmother accompanying them who should be carrying 2 lakhs in cash or wearing a good amount of gold jewelry. The amount or number of incidents of rape in India seems not-too-high -> that's probably because most such incidents are in fact not even reported to the police either because the perpetrato...

Americans are having to scrimp … saving quarters for diapers … Americans luckily have access to a few social safety nets provided by the government such as Medicaid, unemployment benefits, food stamps, etc. Then, non-governmental organizations and religious charities pitch in to provide whatever help they can. The effects of this prolonged recession are definitely going to be far-reaching on the psyche of those who will have gone through long periods of unemployment. This is happening after some seven decades. So, very few are alive today who had experienced it the last time it happened. The last recession was followed by an economic boom aided by both government policies as well as the ‘martial’ nations of Europe who still wanted to fight one last great, climactic mother of all wars after the Great War. The lessons for India? I think the message is a very sobering one. If a nation as advanced and prosperous can suffer such havoc from economic cycles of boom and bust, what chance does...

Indians need to be more self-critical. Indians who belong to the middle and upper classes are all too happy at the way things are. They are happy with the situation where there are really only a very few people who are wealthy in this country and the rest are in wretched poverty. This, of course, serves the wealthy as they can employ the poor to take care of their numerous needs ... there's someone to drive the car, someone to babysit, someone to wash the clothes, someone else to do the dishes, someone to wash the car, someone to do the gardening, someone else to do the cooking, and may be someone to bring the vegetables from the market as well ... Rich Indians live a royal life in many ways. And they go outside of India for holidays and come back and talk about how nice and wonderful things are abroad and how wrteched things are in India. Then there are others like Arundhati Roy who like to point out the wretchedness of life that is the reality for many Indians. People like her wa...

I read in a Bob Herbert column in the New York Times that UC Berkeley is suffering from all the woes afflicting California's budget. I saw once that California has an economy that's larger than Russia's. UC Berkeley is apparently the pinnacle of California's public higher education system. When governments face budget deficits, they often look at education expenditures as a low-hanging fruit. This is unfortunate, but perhaps pure 'research' into the origins of the human race or into the private life of some long-dead writer seems to be rather academic to budget planners compared to, say, unemployment allowance or health-related expenditures. Again, within the broad umbrella of education, it's topics such as music education in schools which is often the first one to bear the brunt of budget cuts when times are tough. There is this wonderful movie called Mr. Holland's Opus starring Richard Dreyfus that depicts something of this over a 30 year period. The ...

So, India found water on the Moon!!! That was the over-simplied headline in all the newspapers and on TV channels. However, the reality is, of course, as usual a little bit more complicated than that! The simple truth is that a NASA payload, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) found spectroscopic evidence of trace quantities of water on the Moon. This is not really all that of a revolutionary finding. In fact, this was kind of a discovery waiting to happen or waiting for confirmation. It is of course not as if anyone has found great flowing rivers or oceans of water on the Lunar surface - that ain't gonna happen, ever!!! The fact is this: the Moon is not where the game is as of now in terms of space exploration! All the big boys of space (U.S., Russia) have explored Moon in the sixties. The game, if India wants to play, is on Mars right now. It really is a simple matter of how much resource(a.k.a. money) you are willing to put into it. Space science is pricey and nations have to decide...