Re: [silk] Why My Father Hated India

[gabin kattukaran]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 5:48 AM, Thaths  wrote:
> Why My Father Hated India
> Aatish Taseer, the son of an assassinated Pakistani leader, explains
> the history and hysteria behind a deadly relationship
> By AATISH TASEER

On almost similar lines -

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0621/In-Pakistan-denial-is-easier-than-heartbreak

In Pakistan, denial is easier than heartbreak
Pakistanis have long revered their Army as heroic and pure. Now,
they're coming to terms with the fact that it might not be as awesome
as they thought. Denial is a natural reaction.



-Gabin

-- 

measure with a micrometer, mark with a chalk, cut with an axe

Re: [silk] Is this true?

[Udhay Shankar N]

On 7/16/2011 6:50 AM, Amit Varma wrote:

> This is a bit of a bitch, because they don't have filters to sort your
> mail by size, so you can't efficiently delete heavy emails you no longer
> need. 

There are third party services that claim to do this, such as
findbigmail. However, a more prudent solution (that does not involve
giving an untrusted website access to your email) would be to access
your gmail account via IMAP and then use your email client (e.g
Thunderbird) to sort by size and delete the mail you don't need.

See http://www.tothepc.com/archives/sort-gmail-by-email-attachment-size/
for some instructions.

Udhay

-- 
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))

Re: [silk] Is this true?

[Gautam John]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 6:50 AM, Amit Varma  wrote:

> This is a bit of a bitch, because they don't have filters to sort your mail
> by size, so you can't efficiently delete heavy emails you no longer need.

I use this https://www.findbigmail.com/ - it's really useful!

Re: [silk] Why My Father Hated India

[ss]

On Saturday 16 Jul 2011 5:48:05 am Thaths wrote:
> Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were
> thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared
> with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So
> what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and
> famine.
> 

LOL 

This is the urban myth around which the Pakistani elite with the likes of 
Salman Taseer at the top liked to delude their small R.A.P.E (Rich Anglophone 
Pakistani Elite) communities. Apart from Islamabad airport, smart urban areas  
and superb interconnecting highways built on American aid, Pakistan was pretty 
much as decrepit as India, having been part of the same sorry mess of 1947. 
They only built little fortresses around themselves and imagined that their 
environment reptresents all of Pakistan. Like pretending that the Ambani 
mansion in Mumbai represents how all people live in Mumbai. Where's the 
rolleyes symbol? 

It took until 1990 for the realization that imagination cannot traslate into 
reality withoout putting one's money where one's mouth happens to be. 
Cognitive dissonance was apparently catching up with Taseer when he was put 
out of his misery in a merciful act of Qadrification by his bodyguard Mumtaz 
Hussein Qadri.

A hack thoo to the memory of Salman Taseer who represents everything that made 
Pakistan what it is today. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvioAKTyK_4

shiv

Re: [silk] Is this true?

[Amit Varma]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 6:06 AM, Madhu Menon  wrote:

> Rule of thumb for Internet forwards: assume 99% of it is untrue.
>

In this case it's probably true. When you run out of space on gmail, they
ask you to buy additional space:
https://www.google.com/accounts/b/0/PurchaseStorage

This is a bit of a bitch, because they don't have filters to sort your mail
by size, so you can't efficiently delete heavy emails you no longer need.


-- 
Amit Varma
http://www.indiauncut.com
http://www.twitter.com/amitvarma

Re: [silk] Is this true?

[Madhu Menon]

Rule of thumb for Internet forwards: assume 99% of it is untrue.

--
Madhu Menon
http://twitter.com/madmanweb
MCorp Hospitality Consulting: http://mcorphospitality.com

[silk] Why My Father Hated India

[Thaths]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576445862242908294.html#printMode

Why My Father Hated India
Aatish Taseer, the son of an assassinated Pakistani leader, explains
the history and hysteria behind a deadly relationship
By AATISH TASEER

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman
Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down
over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves
messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and
his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted
his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's
unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved
in 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused
considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by
my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my
father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a
Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three
years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of
its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the
rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of
the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question.
Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness
to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining
the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a
cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal,
addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in
which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical
essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would
be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic
society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the
partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be
no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly
became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would
be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came
into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in
history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the
modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it
meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in
India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and
homelessness.

But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised
big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its
separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by
its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been
common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition.
Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals,
marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task
of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that
many came to view as a contamination.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of
something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown
identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it
self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new
Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional
culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India,
Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it
was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as
many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past
that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political
turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a
single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in
1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been
a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and
pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were
thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared
with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So
what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and
famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of
the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in
the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the
quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the
emergence 

Re: [silk] Is this true?

[Charles Haynes]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Deepa Mohan  wrote:

> Manjula Sridhar
> gmail no longer free ?? I got the notification that my space has run-out, I 
> have been using it for 6 years or so and now asking me $5 dollars per year ! 
> When did this fundamental shift happen ? will others follow the suit ? golden 
> age coming to an end?
>
> I am very intrigued...how will Google prevent everyone from opening new 
> accounts? Is this some kind of spam?

Phishing. A crook is lying to you, impersonating Google in an attempt
to get you to send them your personal details.
-- Charles

[silk] Is this true?

[Deepa Mohan]

Manjula Sridhar 
gmail no longer free ?? I got the notification that my space has run-out, I
have been using it for 6 years or so and now asking me $5 dollars per year !
When did this fundamental shift happen ? will others follow the suit ?
golden age coming to an end?
I am very intrigued...how will Google prevent everyone from opening new
accounts? Is this some kind of spam?

Deepa.

Re: [silk] Mission: Bangalore silk meetup - FRI July 15

[Biju Chacko]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 7:54 PM, gabin kattukaran  wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Udhay Shankar N  wrote:
>>> How many people is the final count at?
>>
>> 7-10, I think.
>>
>
> Thanks to some idiot customers, my meeting is cancelled. So, -1 :(

-1

Am at home tending viral fever inflicted wife and children. :-(

-- b

[silk] Sunny Days

[Udhay Shankar N]

1.366 kW/m². Remember that number. :)

Udhay

http://www.fastcompany.com/1766347/mit-researchers-figure-out-how-to-cheaply-print-solar-cells-on-paper-fabric

MIT Researchers Crack The Code On Cheaply Printing Solar Cells On Paper,
Fabric
BY Ariel Schwartz
Tue Jul 12, 2011

Now panels can be made lightweight, cheaply, and cleanly. It could be
the first step in revolutionizing how we generate solar power.

Researchers have long toyed with the idea of printing solar cells onto
paper. But MIT researchers have taken the idea one giant step further
with a process [1] that cheaply and easily prints out solar cells on
regular plastic, cloth, or paper--without the need for high temperatures
or potentially damaging liquids. It's still in the research stages at
the moment--the cells barely produce enough to power a cell phone--but
light, cheap, flexible solar panels could one day be revolutionary.

The process is, according to MIT, much like the one used make the
"silver lining in your bag of potato chips." Layers of "inks" are
printed onto a sheet of paper. The materials form patterns of solar
cells on the paper's surface, which is also used as the solar cell's
substrate (traditional solar cells use more expensive materials like
glass as a substrate). Wires can be attached directly to the cells.
Voila! Solar power.

Check out the paper cells in action [2]:

The solar cells produced by the process are durable, too; they can
function even when folded into paper airplane form. And a solar cell
printed onto PET plastic can be folded and unfolded a thousand times
without losing performance. MIT even ran the cells through a laser
printer and found that the heat of that process didn't damage the panels.

The paper-printed solar cells still only have an efficiency of
1%--enough to power a tiny gadget--but the implications for this kind of
technology are huge. Solar cell costs could drop dramatically without
the high costs of substrates like glass and installation (these solar
cells could be used as, say, wallpaper or window curtains). Paper costs
just one-thousandth as much as glass to cover a given area. And the
lightweight cells could more easily be transported to remote places in
the developing world. Just imagine: a truck filled with millions of
pieces of solar cell-covered loose leaf paper.


[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201101263/abstract
[2] http://www.youtube.com/v/21O0tBe-Alk

-- 
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))