THE INDIAN DREAM

Ever since the phrase “American dream” was coined in the 1930s there has been varying definitions about what it really meant.
While some talk of it as a dream of an egalitarian social order, others look upon it as the pursuit of material prosperity— a family with a comfortable home in the suburb, a large car, plentiful food and all the creature comforts to live the good life.
Whatever the definition Americans prefer, it’s probably not a bad idea to define what the Indian dream is all about.

For many of us of the Indian middle class, it is usually having a family with two children (preferably a boy and a girl) studying in reputed educational institutions, a steady paying job, a three-bedroom house (one for guests or for ageing parents), an up-market car, holidays in hills stations or abroad, a circle of friends to party with, contributions to a charity and no worries of bomb blasts or being mugged on the way home.

With oil prices shooting up and climate change all too evident perhaps it’s time to redefine that dream rather than make the mistakes made by our American friends or those living in other G8 countries.

Maybe having a personal vehicle is not such a good idea especially if you have to spend Rs 300 a day on petrol for the car just to commute to office. Not to mention cost of the vehicle, its maintenance, repairs and insurance. Instead, our dream should be to have an excellent public transport system like a metro rail that could get you to most places in the city without you having to pay too much or wade through traffic snarls.
If you have to buy a family vehicle, instead of dreaming about a gas-guzzling SUV to take you and the brats up the hills, a compact fuel efficient car may be the best thing to aspire for.Our dream houses too could undergo a change. They could be made far more energy efficient both in the way it is insulated against heat and cold so that we spend far less on air-conditioners or room heaters.
We could dream of a day where we would all have heaters or lights powered by solar-charged batteries that we install on the roof of our houses. Or even by community windmills if we lived in a co-operative society that has land to spare.

We could also think of doing away with the use of plastic bags for shopping and insisting that the appliances we buy or the bulbs that we install are energy efficient and don’t harm the environment when disposed off.
Call it the new Indian dream but it is worth aspiring for because we could lead the world by example in our quest to save ourselves and the earth.

INDO-US Nuclear deal

* The amendment overturns a 30-year-old US ban on supplying India with nuclear fuel and technology, implemented after India's first nuclear test in 1974.

* Under the amendment, India must separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities, and submit civilian facilities to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

WHY IS IT CONTROVERSIAL?

* Critics say it undermines the NPT, which holds that only countries which renounce nuclear weapons qualify for civilian nuclear assistance.

* The accord sends the wrong message: it could undercut a US-led campaign to curtail Iran's nuclear program, and open the way for a potential arms race in South Asia.

* India says 14 of its 22 nuclear facilities are civilian. Critics say the pact could make bomb making at the other eight easier, as civilian nuclear fuel needs will be met by the US

WHAT DO THE DEAL'S SUPPORTERS SAY?

* US President George Bush calls the deal necessary to reflect the countries' improved relations. It strengthens international security by tightening US ties to ally India, the world's biggest democracy. It also ensures some of its nuclear industry will undergo international inspection.

* New Delhi, which relies on imported oil for some 70 per cent of its energy needs, says nuclear power will help feed its rapidly expanding economy.

* France, which signed a similar deal with India in February 2006, says the move will help fight climate change and aid non-proliferation efforts.

HOW IS PAKISTAN INVOLVED?

* Pakistan sought a similar civilian technology deal with the US but was refused last in March. It is the only other confirmed nuclear power not to have signed the NPT - saying it will join after India does.

* Pakistan's own expanding nuclear program could fan the rivalry between India and Pakistan.

INTERNATIONAL RIVALRIES?

* China is said to have supported Pakistan's nuclear weapons program since the 1980s. Some analysts see the Indo-US deal as part of attempts by larger powers, the US and China, to shore up influence in South Asia by building up rival arsenals.

* The IAEA said in 2004 that Libya and Iran's nuclear programs were based on Chinese technology provided by Pakistan.

FACTS to make everyone Proud

Q. Who is the GM of Hewlett Packard (hp) ?
A. Rajiv Gupta
Q. Who is the creator of Pentium chip (needs no introduction as 90% of the today's computers run on it)?

A. Vinod Dahm

Q. Who is the third richest man on the world?

A. According to the latest report on Fortune Magazine, it is Azim Premji, who is the CEO of Wipro Industries. The Sultan of Brunei is at 6 th position now.

Q. Who is the founder and creator of Hotmail (Hotmail is world's No.1 web based email program)?

A. Sabeer Bhatia

Q. Who is the president of AT & T-Bell Labs (AT & T-Bell Labs is the creator of program languages such as C, C++, Unix to name a few)?

A. Arun Netravalli
Q. Who is the new MTD (Microsoft Testing Director) of Windows 2000, responsible to iron out all initial problems?
A. Sanjay Tejwrika

Q. Who are the Chief Executives of CitiBank, Mckensey & Stanchart?

A. Victor Menezes, Rajat Gupta, and Rana Talwar.

Q. We Indians are the wealthiest among all ethnic groups in America , even faring better than the whites and the natives.

There are 3.22 millions of Indians in USA (1.5% of population). YET, 38% of doctors in USA are Indians.
12% scientists in USA are Indians. 36% of NASA scientists are Indians.
34% of Microsoft employees are Indians.

28% of IBM employees are Indians.

17% of INTEL scientists are Indians.

13% of XEROX employees are! Indians.

Some of the following facts may be known to you. These facts were recently published in a German magazine, which deals with WORLD HISTORY FACTS ABOUT INDIA .

1. India never invaded any country in her last 1000 years of history.

2. India invented the Number system. Zero was invented by Aryabhatta.

3. The world's first University was established in Takshila in 700BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4 th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.

4. According to the Forbes magazine, Sanskrit is the most suitable language for computer software.

5. Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to humans.

6. Although western media portray modern images of India as poverty striken and underdeveloped through political corruption, India was once the richest empire on earth.

7. The art of navigation was born in the river Sindh 5000 years ago. The very word 'Navigation' is derived from the Sanskrit word NAVGATIH.

8. The value of pi was first calculated by Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is now k! nown as the Pythagorean Theorem. British scholars have last year (1999) officially published that Budhayan's works dates to the 6 th Century which is long before the European mathematicians.

9. Algebra, trigonometry and calculus came from India . Quadratic equations were by Sridharacharya in the 11 th Century; the largest numbers the Greeks and the Romans used were 106 whereas Indians used numbers as big as 10 53.

10.. According to the Gemmological Institute of America, up until 1896, India was the only source of diamonds to the world.

11. USA based IEEE has proved what has been a century-old suspicion amongst academics that the pioneer of wireless communication was Professor Jagdeesh Bose and not Marconi.

12. The earliest reservoir and dam for irrigation was built in Saurashtra.

13. Chess was invented in India .
14. Sushruta is the father of surgery. 2600 years ago he and health scientists of his time conducted surgeries like cesareans, cataract, fractures and urinary stones.. Usage of anaesthesia was well known in ancient India .

15. When many cultures in the world were only nomadic forest dwellers over 5000 years ago, Indians established Harappan culture in Sindhu Valley ( Indus Valley Civilisation).

16. The place value system, the decimal system was developed in India in 100 BC. Quotes about India .

We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made. Albert Einstein. India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grand mother of tradition. Mark Twain. If there is one place on the face of earth where all dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India . French scholar Romain Rolland.
India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border. Hu Shih (former Chinese ambassador to USA )

ALL OF THE ABOVE IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG, THE LIST COULD BE ENDLESS. BUT, if we don't see even a glimpse of that great India in the India that we see today, it clearly means that we are not working up to our potential; and that if we do, we could once again be an evershining and inspiring country setting a bright path for rest of the world to follow. I hope you enjoyed it and work towards the welfare of INDIA .

Please forward this email to all known INDIANS................

How Software Agents and Search Engines Work

There are at least three elements to search engines that I think are important: information discovery & the database, the user search, and the presentation and ranking of results.

Discovery and Database

A search engine finds information for its database by accepting listings sent in by authors wanting exposure, or by getting the information from their "Web crawlers," "spiders," or "robots," programs that roam the Internet storing links to and information about each page they visit. Web crawler programs are a subset of "software agents," programs with an unusual degree of autonomy which perform tasks for the user. How do these really work? Do they go across the net by IP number one by one? Do they store all or most of everything on the Web?

According to The WWW Robot Page, these agents normally start with a historical list of links, such as server lists, and lists of the most popular or best sites, and follow the links on these pages to find more links to add to the database. This makes most engines, without a doubt, biased toward more popular sites. A Web crawler could send back just the title and URL of each page it visits, or just parse some HTML tags, or it could send back the entire text of each page. Alta Vista is clearly hell-bent on indexing anything and everything, with over 30 million pages indexed (7/96). Excite actually claims more pages. OpenText, on the other hand, indexes the full text of less than a million pages (5/96), but stores many more URLs. Inktomi has implemented HotBot as a distributed computing solution, which they claim can grow with the Web and index it in entirety no matter how many users or how many pages are on the Web. By the way, in case you are worrying about software agents taking over the world, or your Web site, look over the Robot Attack Page. Normally, "good" robots can be excluded by a bit of Exclusion Standard code on your site.

It seems unfair, but developers aren't rewarded much by location services for sending in the URLs of their pages for indexing. The typical time from sending your URL in to getting it into the database seems to be 6-8 weeks. Not only that, but a submission for one of my sites expired very rapidly, no longer appearing in searches after a month or two, apparently because I didn't update it often enough. Most search engines check their databases to see if URLs still exist and to see if they are recently updated.

y2k

The letters Y and K separated by the number 2 made a very interesting word just before the year 2000. Y2K was really a shorthand term with a potentially scary meaning back in 1998 and 1999. Y2K is an abbreviation for “The Year 2000.”

It was most often used when talking about potential computer problems that were anticipated with the world moving into the 21st century. Back in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when computers were first built, the designers of the programs that made the computers run used only two numbers instead of four to indicate the year. For example, 1998 was 98. This was done as a cost-saving measure. In the 1990s, many computer programmers continued using the two numbers instead of four.

As we moved toward the year 2000, it was realized that a massive computer problem could occur, because all computer processors and software using the two-digit feature were going to stop moving forward and revert back to 1900, instead of to 2000. Fears were that all computer-operated equipment manufactured with a computer processor, like televisions and microwave ovens, would fail because the computer memory would not recognize the date 00.

Some really negative people were frightening folks with comments about the world going dark at midnight on January 1, 2000, since electrical systems were operated by computers. Some were saying that the world would become chaotic and that money in the stock market would disappear since those monies had not been around in 1900, leaving investors penniless.

Well, here we are several years after Y2K and we now know, that at midnight, January 1, 2000, very little changed. Many computer companies spent the last few years of the 20th century fixing the glitch that panicked the world. An interesting side effect from all of this effort came as a large increase in computer service companies. These companies moved from being small businesses started to repair a potentially frightening computer problem, to the bright technological future we see ahead of us.

Some people feel that the integrated technology companies in India started with this one computer problem being addressed. Many feel that the New York Stock Exchange was able to reassemble its systems shortly after the 9/11 disaster because of the related Y2K repair work they had done.

January 1, 2000 marked a very important date in the history of the world. It moved into the 21st Century with technology designed to make our lives easier and let us work smarter, all because of Y2K.

Indians enjoy happy sex lives, but know little till 15

Indians lead fulfilling sex lives but get their first formal sex education at a little over 15 years of age as compared to the West where lessons on the birds and the bees start from 12, says a new global study.

Though Indians know how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS, awareness on how to avoid pregnancy is very low.

These are the findings of the 'Face of Global Sex 2008 - The path to sexual confidence' survey conducted among 26,000 people in 26 countries by condom manufacturer Durex to explore the effectiveness of sex education.

'India starts sex education for children a little after 15 years, though in Western countries it starts from 12 onwards,' the report said.

This could be one of the reasons why Indians had little knowledge of how to avoid pregnancy. Indians scored a mere 70 percent, even less than Japan at 70.9 percent. The highest was scored by South Africa (86.5 percent) and Spain (86 percent).

'These results highlight the need for good school-based education. Unfortunately, in many countries high quality school-based sexual education is lacking,' the report said.

The study also found that most Asian countries fell well behind Western countries when it came to being confident about protecting themselves against sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS.

It pointed out that in Mexico, a child receives formal sex education at the age of 12 - perhaps the reason why its people scored one of the highest (81.6 percent) on overall confidence about sex.

'Comprehensive and inclusive sex education between the ages of 11 and 16 is vital for people to develop sexual confidence in later life. Also, those who have more confidence are better equipped to protect themselves against STIs and unwanted pregnancies,' it said.

In Asia, India and China are the two countries that start sex education in school when children are 15 years and above. Other countries in the region start education either a little before or a little after a child turns 14.

Indians, however, seemed to fare better as far as other Asian countries were concerned on knowing where to go for help and guidance on sex.

While India scored 68.8 percent, Malaysia stood at 67.6 percent and China scored 66.1 when it came to knowing where to go for help on sex. The other countries were Singapore (66.1 percent), Hong Kong (63.2 percent) and Thailand (61.7 percent).

The survey showed that Japan scored less in terms of most criteria - not only in Asia but globally too. Despite Japan starting sex education at 12 years, they are the least confident about sex (58.8 percent), have no idea whom to turn to for guidance (42.4 percent) and how to avoid pregnancy (70.9 percent).

No wonder people in Japan do not lead a happy and fulfilling sex life. They scored 54.3 percent - the lowest in the world - with the highest scored by Brazil (79.6 percent), Mexicans (78.4 percent) and Nigerians (78.2 percent) in this aspect.

India scored 72.4 percent as far as having a good sex life was concerned. As compared to other Asian countries, it scored a little less than Malaysia that got 73.5 percent.

In this aspect, India was also better off than Germany, France, Australia, Poland, Russia, Singapore and Thailand as far as having a fulfilling sex life is concerned, the report said.

The report found that although parents and guardians were the most successful confidence boosters, they were only listed as the eighth most likely source to be approached for sex education - falling well behind friends, the internet and TV.

There were also distinct gender differences in terms of where people go for information on sexual issues. Males were more likely to use the media - magazines, the internet, TV and radio - or institutional sources.

Females, on the other hand, preferred more interpersonal sources, such as parents, partners, family and doctors.