Libya Looks to a Future Without Gaddafi - TIME

Libya Looks to a Future Without Gaddafi - TIME: "Libya, they explain, is more traditional than its neighbors Tunisia and Egypt. The activists say they want to see a new government that preserves Libyan culture, not a democracy imported from elsewhere. Says al-Shohiby: 'I have one soul. I will give it for this revolution — not just for money, but for freedom. We want freedom, but democracy that fits with our culture. Not just any democracy. One that respects our religion. Libya is 100% Muslim and Sunni, and 100% original Libyan. So we need to make our own democracy. We need support from outside — the U.S. and U.K. — but not to tell us what to do. We just want advice.'"

If Libya Falls, What Happens to All Those Twitter bit.ly Links? - TIME.com

If Libya Falls, What Happens to All Those Twitter bit.ly Links? - TIME.com: "If you're a serious or even occasional twitterer, you may have wondered what the '.ly' at the end of those shortened bit.ly URLs stand for. Well, the answer is Libya. Like '.uk' for United Kingdom or '.jp' for Japan, .ly is a country code top-level domain that serves as an alternative to 'generic' top-level domains such as '.com' or '.net'. So now that Libya is further slipping into chaos, an obvious question arises: what happens to all those shortened links?

Two scenarios: one good, and one pretty bad."

IPL 2011: Hot News

• Kochi team will be called "Indi Commandos"
• The Opening match of IPL 2011 will happen between defending champions Chennai Super Kings and Kolkata Knight Riders at Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai.
• A total of 10 teams will play at 13 venues over 51 days.
• The schedule can change due to the state assembly elections at different host venues.

Fake truth of Suraj aka Nagesh : MTV Roadies 8

"Suraj aka Nagesh of MTV Roadies 8 has been a student of the Indian Institute of Bartending. If this listing of Suraj aka Nagesh from MTV Roadies 8 in the students profile isn’t enough, then nothing will be. We’ve just resized the image but please feel free to check http://www.iibtindia.com/placement.html
Suraj aka Nagesh from MTV Roadies 8 boasts of the 9th student profile that’s featured on the institute website. If you look closely, Suraj aka Nagesh from MTV Roadies 8 has his eyebrow pierced and is quite a happening dude from Jalna, and quite hep for being broke."

Read the complete story...Fake truth of Suraj aka Nagesh : MTV Roadies 8

Two Indians in Man Asian Literary Prize shortlist

Two Indians in Man Asian Literary Prize shortlist: "Works by Indian writers Manu Joseph and Tabish Khair have been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (MALP), the leading international award for authors from the continent.

Poet-novelist Khair's The Thing About Thugs is story of Amir Ali who leaves his village in Bihar to travel to London with an English captain, William Meadows, to whom he narrates the story of his life — the story of a murderous thug."

Census 2011 - a Herculean Task

Over the night of February 28 and March 1, a small and businesslike army will spread across the land. To locate their targets, this army will look into municipal pipes, under flyovers and bridges, on footpaths, along railway lines, up dark staircases, around places of worship - everywhere the legions of the "houseless" come to rest. Other elusive targets will have been captured on the preceding day, including tourists in hotels and every human on every ship that will be in Indian territorial waters at midnight.

For 00:00 on March 1, 2011, is the moment of reckoning. The Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner has to find out exactly how many human beings there are in the territory of India at that moment, Indians as well as foreigners.

I was reading this very informative article on the Census 2011 of India and found some very interesting. I am jotting down some interesting facts/figures here:

• The headcount will be done by 2.7 million teachers as the enumerators.
• About half the enumerators are women. They will go along with their colleague or family to avoid possible harassment.
• For this work, each of the enumerator will get paid up to Rs 6,500.
• This Census will try to answer questions like how many PhDs live in houses without latrines.
• The government has allocated Rs 2,200 crore for the Census, which brings the per capita cost to Rs 18 ( The lowest in the world; in the United States, it costs almost $50).
• In Sentinel Islands in the Andamans, where the tribes are still hostile, the enumerators will throw coconuts and red cloth into the sea. Once these hit the shores, the tribesmen will come out to gather these presents. From afar, the enumerators will take video films, come back and freeze the frames, and count their numbers.
• The headcount in snow-bound villages of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand was completed between September 11 and October 5, 2010. Births and deaths after that will go unrecorded.
• For the first time, apart from male and female, respondents can tick a third option - others.
• How accurate is the headcount? The omission rate was 1.8 % in 1981, 1.9 % in 1991 and 2.3 % in 2001. This year, it is expected to be around 2 % - the internationally accepted norm.

You can read the complete article at Business Standard.

Census 2011 is also on Facebook at Census2011 - Facebook

Transcript of Commencement Speech at Stanford given by Steve Jobs

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much.

[I copied it from a friend's Facebook note who might have got it from somewhere else. I found it very interesting and inspiring and therefore I am posting it here. Hope you too will appreciate it. - Shayan]

Arab unrest index: The Shoe Thrower's index | The Economist

Arab unrest index: The Shoe Thrower's index | The Economist: "Shoe Thrower's index aims to predict where the scent of jasmine may spread next.
The chart in the attached link is the result of ascribing a weighting of 35% for the share of the population that is under 25; 15% for the number of years the government has been in power; 15% for both corruption and lack of democracy as measured by existing indices; 10% for GDP per person; 5% for an index of censorship and 5% for the absolute number of people younger than 25."

Another Rags-to-Riches Story from Bihar

My home in Patna is near to the Patna Golf Club and therefore I have some interest in the golf players from Bihar. Once I was travelling in AC 2-tier from Patna to Bangalore, (That was my 1st experience in AC 2-tier. :P) I saw a gentleman reading 'Golf Digest' - a popular Golf magazine in India. I had always had this notion that only big shots travel by AC 2-tier & therefore I started to think that that guy might be some famous golfer. Actually he turned out to be an army personnel who used to play Golf. I wanted to know more from him about Golf in Bihar and thus I started the conversation with him. I started with the little knowledge that I had about the players from Bihar which included the name of Ashok Kumar. And I was pleasantly surprised that this army man had actually played along with Ashok Kumar.
Ashok Kumar (Wikipedia) was born into a poor family in Bihar that struggled to make ends meet. So he was sent to Delhi to earn his living. He then from being a helper at the Jaipur Polo Club, finally rose to the No. 3 among Indian Golf Players.

“I was back to square one. I then went away to help a lorry owner who was transporting sand. I remember the days when I had to pay Rs. 5 to hire a blanket during winter and sleep in Connaught Place,” recalled Ashok.

Please read a complete account on him in this article in the Hindu newspaper published on May. 06, 2010:
                                              Happy with ‘God's gift through golf'

There are many other similar Rags-to-Riches stories in India...

What exactly is happening to this world??

While reading the article "Why food prices could tumble soon" in the Economic Times today I found some very interesting facts. They are:

• In Trading Places, a great American comedy, where Murphy makes a fortune in concentrated orange juice futures, gave birth to the famous "Eddie Murphy Rule". It reveals the secret of trading.
• Though Egypt is a small oil producer, it is an important gateway for oil (through Suez Canal and the 200-mile long Sumed pipeline, which connects Red Sea and the Mediterranean). The Protests in Egypt could affect and thus divert tankers around the southern tip of Africa, adding 6,000 miles to transit and thus shoot the oil price.
• Argentina is experiencing dry conditions due to La Niña, a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that is the counterpart of El Niño. And the neighbouring Brazil is affected by heavy rains. 2012 is near!!
• Brazil is a large producer of high-quality Arabica. Floods there have driven coffee's price to multi-year highs.
• Brazil's floods could also affect the sugar's price all over the world as it accounts for 60% of global sugar exports.
• Ivory Coast has banned exports of cocoa (40% of global exports) and cocoa has scaled a 33-year high.
• Australia is also hit by floods and they contribute to 2/3rd of seaborne supply of coking coal, a very important industrial input.
• Between 1965 and 1998, global population rose from 3.3 billion to 5.9 billion. A rise of 2.6 billion or almost double in just over a quarter century. Today we stand at around 7 billion and Indian contributes more than 17% to it.

These facts just tell that we still do not have control over this world even though we do have some many remote controlled devices all around us.

WikiLeaks Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize - TIME

WikiLeaks Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize - TIME: "The Norwegian Nobel Committee keeps candidates secret for 50 years, but those with nomination rights sometimes make their picks known.

Snorre Valen, a 26-year-old legislator from Norway's Socialist Left Party, told The Associated Press he handed in his nomination in person on Tuesday, the last day to put forth candidates. 'I think it is important to raise a debate about freedom of expression and that truth is always the first casualty in war,' Valen said. 'WikiLeaks wants to make governments accountable for their actions and that contributes to peace.'"

Nalanda misses trophy scholars | The Telegraph

Nalanda misses trophy scholars | The Telegraph: "Two of India’s finest intellectual-academicians — Ramchandra Guha and Pratap Bhanu Mehta — passed up offers to accept the vice-chancellorship of Nalanda International University (NIU), Bihar’s flagship knowledge project.

Charge of the NIU will formally be handed over to Nobel laureate and chairperson of the NIU Mentor Group, Amartya Sen, by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar on February 5.

Only last month, artist Subodh Gupta, himself a product of Patna Arts College, had told this reporter during a private visit to Bihar that much as he’d like to, conditions in the state do not inspire him to set up an arts facility."

Facebook launching third party commenting platform

Facebook launching third party commenting platform: "Facebook is soon launching a third-party commenting system, that will power the comments on large online publications.
This new technology could see Facebook as the engine behind the comments system on many high-profile blogs and other digital publications. The company is actively seeking major media companies and blogs to partner with it for its launch"

How Washington misreads Turkey | Global Post

How Washington misreads Turkey | Global Post: "I'm going to type a word.

Islamist.

What images come to mind?

Now I'm going to type a phrase.

Most dynamic city in the world.


What does it make you think of?

Can you reconcile the two?

Think Islamist, and you probably imagine some un-democratic place with a stagnant, corrupt economy and women encased from head to toe in black cloth. It is joyless and puritanical in the pejorative sense, with innate hostility to America and the West.

Dynamism probably makes you think of New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Rio and Mumbai — places where anything-goes-capitalism has revived after a period of recession.

Well, according to a recent Brookings Institution report the world's most dynamic city is Istanbul, whose Islamist former mayor, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is now Turkey's Prime Minister."