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Computing, Libraries, Tennis, India & other interests of Vikas Kamat
Mr. M.R. Pai, the Champion of Consumer Movement and Forum of Free Enterprise in India, passed away today. Consumer rights is not a very developed concept in India, and Pai was a pioneer. Shown below is a photograph that my father took of him during their brief meeting in 2001. (Mr. Pai had written to us that it is one of his best portraits.) © K. L. Kamat Links Some notes from this year's Wimbledon championships: Mangalore Ranga Pai, popularly known as M.R Pai, passed away on July 3, 2003. He was 72. A consumer activist to the core, M.R Pai brought consumer consciousness to India and till he breathed his last, he remained as one fighting for consumers’ rights and privileges. In the early 50’s, M.R. Pai came to Bombay from Mangalore (Karnataka) in search of a livelihood, armed with a masters’ degree in Political Science. With an M.S degree in journalism from Los Angeles, he returned to India and joined as a Sub Editor of The Times of India for a short time. Consumer exploitation was rampant then and M.R. Pai, restless as he was, fought battles one after the other and was known as the consumers’ champion.
Way back in the 1970’s, he was featured as the man of the year on the cover of the Indian edition of the Reader’s Digest. M.R Pai was responsible for forming the Forum of Free Enterprise. He was also behind the famous post-budget speeches by Nani Palkhivala from 1957 to 1994.
A prolific writer in English, his book “The Legend of Nani Palkhivala” was a best seller, and the royalties
he earned went to various charities.
He was suffering from cancer since May 2002, and though he won many consumer wars, he lost his own battle with cancer in July 2003. In his son Shyam Sunder’s words, "My father never fell ill and never spent on medicine, but now is paying back with interest!"
Google knows where the weapons are! The "I'm Lucky Result" on Google for "Weapons of Mass Destruction" is a hilarious parody (Hint: you must read the error message)
"Bottom of the Page" Technology I have this "Bottom of the Page" idea where at the bottom of every page on Kamat's Potpourri, I want to place a non-intrusive box of related pages, pictures, and merchandise benefiting from Google's AdSense API and Amazon's WebSerives API. Except the "Bottom of the Page" has been already trademarked. So I am going to call it something else...
Perhaps Kamat Medley ? Perhaps Kamat eXtra ?
© K. L. Kamat I had heard about the system of Väränna
(translated as "Weekly Rice") system of education in India, but I
didn't know the details till now. Basically the system works as follows.
Poor brahmin boys used to go out of town for primary education and would
typically stay at premises of a temple or a choultry. But they would have no
food to eat. To spare the student the trouble and humiliation of begging
everyday (which was also prevalent, but mostly applied to brahmin boys
who were initiated into monkhood via munji and studied equivalent of today's
high-school), compassionate families volunteered to feed the student one day of
the week. So, once the student located seven sponsors, he could focus on
learning. Dividing the responsibility among seven families reduced the burden on
them as well, since you had to play sponsor only one day of the week, yet the
the family was entitled to the respect and reward of being charitable. Apparently,
in some parts of southern India -- as late as 1940s, and 1950s this was a very common way to fund education for many poor families. See Also: MLT
(More-Like-This) features are not so easy to implement if they are conceived as
afterthought to creation of content. In our content management system (CMS), we use keywords to associate and
group related content and pictures. But there is much more to MLT than
simple keyword based associations. This week, Hiryoung
and I have started a new initiative that we call eXtra. The project is to
develop associative technology and tools that will suggest products and links
based not on human intelligence, but based in acquired heuristics. Some
of the parameters to consider:
As always, the commercial interests would collide with the academic
interests of this effort. So we'd have to consider ranking a sponsor higher than
the computed value of his link. On some pages at Kamat's Potpourri (example),
if you scroll down (hence the name Bottom of the Page), you will see a
prototype of this experiment. I am surprised at the relevancy already! See Also: Amma reminisces the good old tanga
transport prevalent in Dharwad and old Mysore. I am an engineer by education, and a make a living in the technology. But I
am a human first, and have thought for many years about how mechanization causes
job-loss, and whether or not it is a desired trait for the society. I can argue
on either sides, but with the broader perspective of mankind (and also
animal-kind and plant-kind), I tend to side with forces that preserve the
natural (or God-given) abilities. Meanwhile, BBC reports how technology
is costing art jobs as well in India. For those interested in the history of machines, jobs, and their impact on social life, I recommend my father's last book The Return Journey (Marupayana in Kannada). I am providing below a round-up of Indian blogs. A weekly update of such compilations (known as Bharatiya Blog Mela) makes circles on different Indian blogs. A searchable list of Indian Blogs
can be found at Blog Portal. In "Daddy, why did we attack Iraq?" Srijith provides a bird's eye-view of the Bush's foreign policy. Mahesh Shantaram of Filter-Coffee has fallen off of the web. I told you blogging was a fad... Arun Bhat has been musing in the Indian NorthEast, in the spectacular views. Wow. A lot up updates at Amma's Columun -- from philosophy of Purusha-sukta to the relevance of Pipal Tree... Blogs or other contents published in Indian languages are not searchable, due to the nature of their creation (you type something in English , and it becomes something else, after a process). This is the reason why transliterated content is not accessible via search engines of today. I am using a trick to search our non-English language content. Whenever I create Indian language content, I save the source as a comment in the same document (or blog entry). Then the search engine can find it if I specify the transliterated query. Here is a protype that can search my Kannada Blog. BBC has a concise history of the Korean War. John Robb has been spotted here since
he left UserLand. John is a champion of K-Logs, and he has elaborated some of his ideas on
a recent post. As a computer scientist, I take exception to the use of text documents (or
blog posts) to be referred to as knowledge. Knowledge essentially has to have
intelligence, like rules, decision making or learning ability -- hence a database
can never be a knowledgebase. Having pinpointed my pet peeve, I have some notes from customer sites that
are actually using my SimplyBlog software for capture of human knowledge. More on "Last Updated" A recent experiment called "Winer Watcher" by Mark Pilgrim that reported changes made to a blog post was very popular (it has been since withdran, hence no link), so I am thinking there might be a lot of interest in micro-following the emergence of a blog-post (or a company policy, or a business decision). Definitely something for the designers to consider... Today we live in the period of rapid globalization. We are also living in the period of immature, and idiot analysts telling us why self-sufficiency
is bad (link to John Downen's opinion that self-sufficiency leads to
poverty). I call them idiots because they have not understood the fundamentals of
self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency means that you look inside, not outside for
survival and growth. It is a profound concept and has deep roots in philosophy
(as in strength of character), religion (carrying one's own burden), and economy
(a self-sufficient body is a strong body). It is a time-tested formula, that is
as relevant today as it was thousands of years ago. The idiots are saying "We can't grow our own food anymore, so
self-sufficiency is bad. We can't make our own cloth, so Gandhi was a
fool." Self-sufficiency means only that you will not consume more than what you can
produce, or will not spend more than what you can earn. It just means that you will stand on your own feet. It has nothing to do
with exchange of services, in fact, exchange of products and services at a fair
value is an essential characteristic of a self-sufficient economy. He might be illiterate and poor, but righteous and inspiring. Mohammed Habib (link to BBC story of an unpaid social professional), is my main man. Please enjoy these archives by date, or please see AutoBlog, or see Recycled Blogs. One Year Ago:
Two Years Ago:
BTW, do not try these tricks (content scheduling, inserting of multiple calendars within a blog post, or merging of blogs) with your blog software.
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