BBC NEWS | South Asia | Indecency guide for tourists to India

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Indecency guide for tourists to India: "Do not hug or kiss in public - even when meeting at stations and airports - and do not smoke or consume alcohol publicly either.

These are some of the guidelines being given to tourists visiting a popular part of India's north-western Rajasthan state to ensure they can respect local culture.

The guidelines come after a number of unfortunate cultural faux pas, including an Israeli couple kissing at their Hindu wedding ceremony and a Finnish woman walking naked down the streets of Pushkar.

Officials say the list of these dos and don'ts has been prepared by the local administration in Ajmer district to 'educate foreign tourists about local culture and sensibilities'.

Prithvi Raj Sankhla, Ajmer city's sub-divisional magistrate, told the BBC: 'We have asked hotels and restaurants across the city to hand out the 20-page booklet to tourists as soon as they check in.'

The guidelines say:

* Men should never touch women in public, even to help a woman out of a car, unless the lady is very elderly or infirm

* In Indian culture... men socialise with men, and women with women

* Married couples in Asia do not hug, hold hands or kiss in public. Even embracing at airports and train stations is considered out of the question

* Generally it is improper for women to speak with strangers on the street and especially to strike up a casual conversation

* Drinking alcohol or smoking in public, no matter how innocent, are interpreted as a sign of moral laxity and are not acceptable."

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transgender Symbols

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transgender Symbols: "Pink Triangle

As most everyone knows, the pink triangle is a symbol taken directly from the Nazi concentration camps. Usually when concentration camps and Nazis are mentioned, most people tend to think of Jews and the Jewish Holocaust (for good reason). But the fact that a large number of homosexual prisoners were in those same camps is an often ignored or overlooked fact of history.

The real story behind the pink triangle begins prior to World War II. Paragraph 175, a clause in German law, prohibited homosexual relations (much like many states in the U.S. today have laws against 'crimes of nature'). In 1935, during Hitler's rise to power, he extended this law to include homosexual kissing, embracing, and even having homosexual fantasies. An estimated 25,000 people were convicted under this law between 1937 and 1939 alone. They were sent to prisons and later concentration camps. Their sentence also included sterilization, most commonly in the form of castration. In 1942, Hitler extended the punishment for homosexuality to death.

Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were labeled according to their crimes by inverted colored triangles. 'Regular' criminals were denoted by a green triangle, political prisoners by red triangles and Jews by two overlapping yellow triangles (to form the Star of David, the most common Jewish symbol). Homosexual prisoners were labels with pink triangles. Gay Jews- the lowest form of prisoner- had overlapping yellow and pink triangles. This system also created a social hierarchy among the prisoners, and it has been reported that the pink triangle prisoners often received the worst workloads and were continually harassed and beaten by both guards and other prisoners.

Although homosexual prisoners were not shipped en mass to the Aushwitz death camps like so many of the Jewish prisoners, there were still large numbers of gay men executed there along with other non-Jewish prisoners. The real tragedy thou"

Stonewall Revisited: Homosexual, Lesbian & Gay Issue of Sex & Sexuality

Stonewall Revisited: Homosexual, Lesbian & Gay Issue of Sex & Sexuality: "About Stonewall. For gay, lesbian and bisexual activists, the word 'Stonewall' signifies quite possibly the most important, single landmark in the worldwide struggle for gay rights. Most chroniclers of the homosexual rights movement trace the beginnings of the movement's militant phase to 1969 and New York's lower-Manhattan (largely gay-frequented) Stonewall Bar. There, for the first time on record, homosexual patrons fought back when Stonewall was raided one hot summer night by New York City policemen, who came hoping to arrest gay individuals for engaging in then illegal homosexual acts.

Eyewitnesses claim that the homosexual patrons' counter-riot began when one burly, Stonewall patron hurled a lidded, metal garbage can filled with empty liquor bottles through a police car window.

Ever since that night, Stonewall has been revered as an enduring symbol of the gay militant spark lit that night, which has become a gay/lesbian/bisexual militant conflagration setting America -- and the world -- aflame with gay rights issues and conflicts. "

First result of the SNLS

First result of the SNLS: "WAS EINSTEIN'S BIGGEST BLUNDER A STELLAR SUCCESS? The genius of Albert Einstein, who added a 'cosmological constant' to his equation for the expansion of the universe but later retracted it, may be vindicated by new research. The enigmatic dark energy that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe behaves just like Einstein's famed cosmological constant, according to the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS), an international team of researchers in France and Canada that collaborated with large telescope observers at Oxford, Caltech and Berkeley. Their observations reveal that the dark energy behaves like Einstein's cosmological constant to a precision of 10 per cent. 'The significance is huge,' said Professor Ray Carlberg of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at U of T. 'Our observation is at odds with a number of theoretical ideas about the nature of dark energy that predict that it should change as the universe expands, and as far as we can see, it doesn't.' The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics."

Bihar - Rama Bijapurkar

I hadnt heard of Rama Bijapurkar before. Seems like a very smart person and the article is a pretty interesting read. Its at times like these (change in bihar) that I miss all the noise from the Indian News Channels.

[via Indian Express.]

Relaunching Brand Bihar

Key question for marketers: will children of 'social justice' behave like regular guys?

Rama Bijapurkar

I remember a discussion a few years ago at a strategic planning session of a multinational consumer goods company on how people of India were changing. Lots was said about the positive effects of liberalisation and all its spin-off effects, on the attitudes of the people of India. Until someone suddenly broke the spell by asking, "If all this is true, then why do millions of people vote for Laloo in Bihar? Do we even know for sure?" An expat sitting through the meeting asked for clarification on Laloo and Bihar. And, with huge relish, got told all the Laloo and Bihar jokes and war stories, starting with an introduction to the word Bimaru. The joke about how we would happily hand over all of Kashmir to Pakistan, provided they took Bihar as well; the one that said that Laloo asked the people of Bihar why they needed roads — did they have cars? Motorcycles? Even bicycles? "No? Then why on earth have roads on which the rich man can drive along in a car and spit on you?" The old favourite one of Japan offering to turn Bihar into Japan in three years, and Laloo scoffing and replying that with his superior efficiency he could turn Japan into Bihar in just three months. Another told us the (unverifiable) story of how he was being taken to Singapore for a roadshow by CII, and how he is supposed to have worn his suit and called a "railla" ("rally" being too effeminate a word for his rallies), and said to his people that he was going through all this pain just for them. A journalist friend of mine witnessed one of his earlier election rallies, and said it was a bizarre combination of a mega rock concert ambience and shockingly poor illiterate people who comprised the audience. Why then, asked the expat, do so many millions of people vote him, in the progressive and rapidly progressing India that you have just described? Total silence for a while. Because the Laloo brand, said one person, is about giving identity to an underclass that has been exploited by the upper class forever. It is a brand that emerged to innovatively serve the needs of a post-Mandal society in a state that was the most deeply impacted by virtue of its caste demography and caste history. A qualitative researcher said, "Because he tells the poor that it's okay to be who you are, it's okay to come riding on your cow, carrying your spittoon, you don't have to strive to be like Them." The sales manager explained: "Laloo created bonding through innovative rituals like the 'chhat' festival, making it to Bihar what Ganapati is to Maharashtra; a ritual that even the Shiv Sena borrowed to serve its Bihari migrant votebank, with a mega-event at Juhu beach earlier this year!" A media researcher said, "because they only have 20 per cent reach of television in Bihar, far lower than any other state", so they don't know any better about the world outside. "Because they are Biharis," said someone else, and clinched the argument. But what of the Bihar and the Bihari brand? The Bihar brand was, till today, perceived as a blot on the New Indian landscape. Perceived as a place that was stuck in a time warp, a bullock cart in a world of cars and jet planes, a jungle of lawlessness where power came from the barrel of the goonda's gun, and a land which was the feudal fiefdom of a ruthless and eccentric raja, lording it over his half-starved, uneducated, 80 million-plus people. What was worse was that this eccentric raja was repeatedly being elected back by his subjects, who seemed to want to be trampled all over. But some people were quick to point out, that the "wanting to be trampled all over" view is an uninformed, elitist, chattering view. That in reality, Bihar was the land of the brave that chose, as NDTV said yesterday, perhaps dignity over development. Somehow, when you look at all economic and human development metrics of Bihar, this view is a bit hollow — where's the dignity? Also when you see all the migrants from Bihar, it appears that it is defeatism rather than dignity that was the hallmark of the brand. In the past two days I have read and heard a totally different view of the image people seem to have of Brand Bihar. It has become a re-launched, new improved Bihar. It is seen to be someone who after many years is stirring to life, has shaken off its shackles, woken up from its deep hibernation, and decided to join the rest of India. One of the key shifts we have been seeing in the rest of India, post-liberalisation, is the shift from "demanding social justice" to "grabbing economic opportunity". It is the shift best epitomised by Amitabh Bachchan. The shift from fighting for the social justice underdog in Deewar and Coolie to grabbing the economic opportunity of Kaun Banega Crorepati. Frankly, consumer marketers are relieved. If aspiration for a better life can triumph over everything else even in Bihar, then we know that this brand is in sync with the rest of Consumer India, and there's no looking back on the onward march to deepening consumption. The safety perception of Brand Bihar has just gone up several notches. If bijli, sadak, paani, padhai, vikas and governance are what people want here too, and not caste-based revenge as in "an eye for a past eye", then the Bihar brand is not an unpredictable time bomb that could blow up in the face of the rest of India at any time, but a regular guy, who is wanting to do what regular guys do to improve their lot in life. However before we bring out the champagne and look forward to the Bengal elections, there is this nagging feeling in some of our minds: is this just another trick of electoral arithmetic and split votes? Of upper classes revenging themselves by voting out the patron saint of the lower classes? To borrow a line from an Indian Express editorial, has Bihar truly cast its vote or is this version 2.0 of the state voting its caste? Either way, there is a window of opportunity and I hope we seize it and make our early impressions of a New improved Bihar a reality. The writer is a market strategy consultant

Back home

Wow. I didnt know I would be excited, but going back to India is making me feel very happy : )

EETimes.com - India's HCL Tech to set up PowerPC design center

EETimes.com - India's HCL Tech to set up PowerPC design center: "BANGALORE, India — HCL Technologies Ltd. has acquired the right to use and sub-license IBM Corp.'s PowerPC and PowerPC 440 embedded microprocessor cores and some specific peripheral cores.

HCL (New Delhi) will use the license rights to establish itself as the first Power Architecture design center outside an IBM business line. Plans call for the center to expand power Architecture designs in more applications such as networking, wireless and consumer devices.

The pact will enable HCL to offer original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) a range of Power Architecture system-on-chip (SoC) solutions, including sub-licensing of the IBM PowerPC 405 and PowerPC 440 embedded microprocessor cores. HCL plans to provide customers access to high-performance peripheral cores with a native CoreConnect interface, the open system bus architecture of IBM.

“This alliance helps HCL further expand as a design house,' said Divakar Maddipatla, corporate vice president and head of HCL's semiconductor practice. 'We are excited about the opportunity to offer Power Architecture-based end-to-end design solutions to OEMs.'

HCL already provides system design solutions including VLSI and hardware designs to the consumer, telecoms and storage domains. It is among the top software solutions providers in India and is part of the $2.7 billion HCL Enterprise.

“IBM’s goal is to make Power Architecture solutions as pervasive and as open as possible. This strategy applies not only to our architecture, but extends to our ecosystem of alliance associates and our routes to market,” said Ron Martino, director of Power products at IBM."

Computing the Cost of 'Acting White' - New York Times

Computing the Cost of 'Acting White' - New York Times: "Why would minority students with better grades end up with fewer friends at integrated public schools? Fryer believes it's more a class problem than a race problem - something that arises when a group comes in contact with another group whose members have historically been higher achievers.

'Groups around the world face the same tension,' he said. 'When there are inequalities in society and you have a group that has been fundamentally disadvantaged, there's a tension between wanting to excel in the outside world and being loyal to your own group. If you're in an all-black school and you get good grades, that's not a signal you're being disloyal. But in an integrated school, it can be a signal that you're being disloyal by joining the other group.'

As a result, Fryer says, minority students face a cruel choice at precisely the kinds of integrated schools that are supposed to be eliminating their disadvantages. 'When blacks are forced to pay a social price for getting good grades,' he said, 'there are going to be some black students who won't achieve their full potential.'"

Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan - New York Times

Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan - New York Times: "The two comic books, portraying Chinese and Koreans as base peoples and advocating confrontation with them, have become runaway best sellers in Japan in the last four months.

In their graphic and unflattering drawings of Japan's fellow Asians and in the unapologetic, often offensive contents of their speech bubbles, the books reveal some of the sentiments underlying Japan's worsening relations with the rest of Asia."

Down with Rose

Why does this buffoon just get out of public television ?
What a bungling of the chalabi interview ... IDIOT !!

Itanium sinks again in supercomputers | CNET News.com

Itanium sinks again in supercomputers | CNET News.com: "The Itanium chip family, which Intel has relegated to high-end servers, has rapidly declined on the Top500 Supercomputer list. In November 2004 the list had 84 computers with Itanium 2 processors. In June 2005, the number shrunk to 79.

Now only 46 computers contain Itanium 2 chips, according to the latest list, released Monday.

Meanwhile, the number of supercomputers using Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron chips has increased. A total of 55 Opteron-based computers made the list, up from 25 in June. (Opterons were found in just 29 computers on the November 2004 list.)"

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What does the "Rx" sign mean on pharmacies?

What does the "Rx" sign mean on pharmacies?: "Once again, we can blame Latin for a curious term. In English, 'Rx' doesn't seem to have any connection to 'pharmacy.' However it does in Latin, albeit in a roundabout way.

According to Yahoo! Reference, 'Rx' means 'prescription for medicine.' The letters abbreviate the Latin word recipe, which is a form of the verb 'to take.'

Doctors write Rx in the heading of prescriptions as an instruction to 'take' the medicine. The pharmacists filling the orders understand this shorthand (and hopefully they can read the doctors' handwriting) and print it on pill bottles with whatever else doctors order, such as 'take twice daily with food.' Somewhere along the line, pharmacists started using 'Rx' on their storefront signs so patients knew where to get their doctors' instructions translated.

Another possible meaning for 'Rx' suggests that it's a form of the astrological symbol for the Roman god Jupiter, written on prescriptions to get the god's blessing. However, Jupiter's symbol bears only a faint resemblance to 'Rx.' Although Jupiter was something of a protector figure, mythology doesn't connect him with medicine or healing.

Not surprisingly, this explanation still points the finger at Latin."

ABC News: Sun Microsystems Unveils New Server Chip

ABC News: Sun Microsystems Unveils New Server Chip: "Sun also is touting its new chip as 'eco-friendly.' It said removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees."

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Khushboo's comments stir controversy

Khushboo's comments stir controversy: "Taken aback by the outcry, Kushboo has tendered an open apology to Tamils, especially women, saying she would never dream of sullying the image of the Tamil people. Cutting short her visit to Singapore, she has returned. 'Even in films, I never undertook roles that lowered the image of women,' she has said, in a statement. 'I have the greatest regard for Tamils, especially Tamil women. If my remarks have hurt anybody's feelings, I tender an apology. I am one among you and will always remain with you.'

Meanwhile,a defamation suit has been filed today in a city metropolitan magistrate's court under Sec 499 and 500 of the IPC (punishment for defamation) against the actress. An effigy was also burnt in Salem city."

Wow, she has to now prove that she is culturaaly one with the tamilians. Prime example of how national borders dont mean anything. If you are of a different origin you will always be 'different'. We need people like her to challenge the inertia of the tamilian culture.

Dictionary.com/schtick

Dictionary.com/schtick: "shtick also schtick or shtik Audio pronunciation of 'schtick' ( P ) Pronunciation Key (shtk)
n. Slang

1. A characteristic attribute, talent, or trait that is helpful in securing recognition or attention: waiters in tropical attire are part of the restaurant's shtick.
2. An entertainment routine or gimmick.


[Yiddish shtik, piece, routine, from Middle High German st�cke, piece, from Old High German stukki, crust, fragment.]
"

Boy launches McDonald's boycott over US-Canada lumber rift - Yahoo! News

Boy launches McDonald's boycott over US-Canada lumber rift - Yahoo! News: "MONTREAL (AFP) - A 10-year-old Canadian boy has called for a boycott of US fast food chain McDonald's in hopes of hastening an end to the deep rift over lumber trade between Canada and the United States."

BBC NEWS | Business | Norway in women bosses ultimatum

BBC NEWS | Business | Norway in women bosses ultimatum: "Norway has said it might close down companies that fail to meet proposed boardroom quotas for women.
The new coalition government in Oslo said it was considering introducing a law which would require 40% of boardroom posts to be filled by women.
Norway's previous government drew up the law, which it threatened to apply if companies failed voluntarily to meet minimum quotas by 1 July this year.
Only a fifth of Norway's 590 publicly listed firms comply with the quotas.
'It's not going fast enough,' said Karita Bekkemellem, Norway's minister for family and children.
'I don't want to wait 20 or 30 years until sufficiently intelligent men finally appoint women to the boardrooms.'
She added: 'I wish to establish, from January 1 2006, a system of sanctions which makes it possible to break up companies.'"


I dont know if this is right, infact I think it is not. Most women dont show interest in working hard to make it to the top. Norway should make other changes in the society which makes women want to work as hard. This can be done only in a developed country like Norway, but would a super-duper capitalist society like the US take such steps ever ?

BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Profile: Liberia's 'Iron Lady'

BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Profile: Liberia's 'Iron Lady': "Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, 67, fondly called the 'Iron Lady' by her supporters, is set to become Africa's first elected female head of state following Liberia's presidential run-off."

BBC NEWS | Health | Becoming a father 'civilises' men

BBC NEWS | Health | Becoming a father 'civilises' men: "Fatherhood significantly reduces men's testosterone levels, a study has shown.

US researchers compared levels of the male sex hormone among single men and married men with and without children amongst Chinese students.

Those who were fathers had the lowest levels of all, the Proceedings of the Royal Society study found.

"

Express Shaadi

Whats this obsession with marriage that Indian Express has. They are just trying to cash in on so many young professionals living alone in a foreign country. It all looks very pathetic. What does this say about us guys here in the US ?
Is a moral code which gets 26 yr old guys obsessed with marriage any good ?  Everyday I feel more and more lost trying to understand the world :(
Maybe moral codes are the thumb rules which guide people incapable of acting rationally when let to live by their own accord.
hahahahaha ... democracy where are you ??

BBC NEWS | Technology | Women are 'put off' hi-tech jobs

BBC NEWS | Technology | Women are 'put off' hi-tech jobs: "Part-time work was also identified as having a poor image within the industry. Those who work part-time said they were not given the same responsibilities or opportunities as full-time colleagues.

Many women questioned reported that they would be more inclined to stay if there was less pressure to work long hours in a full-time role."

I would really like more women to contribute to the hi-tech industry. Especially with the latest thrust towards simplicity as a USP I think gender diversity would be very critical. However its clear part time working is considered to be less commitment and thus less appreciated by the employer. How could we change this perception ?
Well I think this perception could just change in some creative industries. In engineering, productivity and the engineer's skills increases linearly with the number of hours you put in. How then would we appreciate someone who is working less hours ?? Am I missing something ??