Continued from here With similar culture and past India has developed a vibrant democracy which functions without conflict (bombings in Syria, Iraq, Egypt or Lebanon are no comparison to the problems of Naxalism or Communal tensions we see in India), with a unfettered record of elections and democratically elected governments, and with an unprecedented record of development. So, what makes India tick which most other Eastern nations experimenting with democracy lack? The answer may lie in  this column by Sidin Vadukut  which explains how the Indian delegation to help resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict in 1947 proposed setting up of a federal republic instead of the two-nation Israel-Gaza-West Bank state that struggles in conflict today. I quote: India, Iran and Yugoslavia, instead, proposed a minority plan that would avoid partition: “An independent federal State of Palestine shall be created following a transitional period not exceeding three years. The independent Federal

Israel and Gaza Image Credit: Amir Farshad Ebrahimi via flickr Since the past 3 decades, the US has tried (unsuccessfully) to spread, its model of capitalist democracy to the rest of the world. Most of Europe is already subservient to the the US interests; in several cases the interests of the West, which includes US and Europe both, are common - for example Oil interests in Middle East. But, economic interests aside, the US has failed utterly in its political goal of establishing 'US style' democracies in Afghanistan first, and then Iraq. And while these two new wars were waged, settled and then sizzled again, the Israel-Palestine conflict shows no signals of subsiding. Why has the US, a successful 200+ year democracy, adept at understanding the nuances of how-democracy-works failed to make the model work outside its borders - more specifically - outside the West? Does the answer lie in the typical difference-between-east-and-west debate or should we simply accept th

Many people here might be running a SoHo and might have faced the problem of either restricting access to certain websites or simply to channelize all internet traffic through a common internet pipe. When a friend of mine - a non-tech entrepreneur - asked me on how he can achieve this, I went into writing him an email (with multiple embedded links) explaining how to use a Proxy Server to achieve the above. Below is a reproduction for everyone to use: If you are using a NetGear router, the router itself might have the setting for restricting users from accessing certain sites - check this http://www.netgear.com/lpc or this link http://documentation.netgear.com/wndr3300/enu/202-10301-01/pdfs/Content.pdf - Page 3-1 Blocking Access to Internet Sites If your router does not have these features then use the method below: Task 1: Install a Proxy Server on your server machine or any other powerful machine Download CCproxy from this link http://www.youngzsoft.net/ccproxy/proxy-se

2013 has possibly been the busiest year of my life till date; it was busy as hell and the hangover still persists. The year started with a Baby Shower in mid January, after which Divya went to her parent's place - beginning a persistent nomadic life for me for more than 6 months. I would dash through the week, managing groceries, maids and bills and run off to either Indore or Pune over weekends to spend alternate weekends with Divya or my parents. If there were weekends when I would be in Mumbai, there would be enough office work piled over to catch up. I spent several train and bus journeys working on my laptop sitting in awkward positions, and being the source of the dim (and for my co-passengers - irritating -) light emanating from my laptop screen. I have been on con-calls at all kinds of odd places - the hospital, highway Dhabas, on way to Mumbai-Pune expressway and Food Plaza on the expressway near Lonavla. Also spent several Monday's coming back from work and goi

As we approach 2014, the din of election rhetoric grows louder - the media and general public discourse alike get influenced by what the politicians put forward and portray. In such an atmosphere, while it is imperative that the real issues should boil to the surface, to the contrary, personality clashes and rhetorical debates will take center stage. One such debate being pushed to forth by the BJP is the comparison's between their PM candidate Narendra Modi and Congress (not yet announced) probable candidate Rahul Gandhi. There are those who accept this contest as one of personalities, and even try to justify the ideological bankruptcy of Rahul Gandhi as his style of leadership ; however most commentators concede [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] that Modi triumphs Gandhi in most sphere's of personality comparisons. Gandhi on his part has tried hard to break the jinx on him; he tried to instill internal democracy within the party, spoke several times against the party's decisions suppor

Some rights reserved by Lord of the Wings With rapid growth, urbanization, rising incomes coupled with rising immigration, the one service which is going to face the most stress is the Indian Railways. As more people move away from their villages and towns to cities, often miles away - they will use the railways to meet family often. As their incomes rise, their visits - both back home to family and leisure related - will rise. Already IRCTC.co.in which is the internet ticketing platform for the Indian railways faces ire  and ridicule from users. Soon such ire may get directed to the railway service itself. This calls for multiple actions on part of the government (which owns and operates the service right now); for example: As I have argued in past, in addition to the current network, India needs a parallel high speed railroad network connecting major hubs and based on completely new technology. This will help take the load off the current network from long dista

Increasingly we see more arrogance than humility - whether its the traffic queue or the mall or in a workplace. Many people today thrive on being arrogant (often termed as 'dynamic and demanding' in the workplace). And the emergence of Narendra Modi is also a part of the same culture we are promoting. While from the same political party - the biggest chasm that separates Atalji from Modi was his humility. And Sachin, the maestro belonged to Atalji's category. His strength and wisdom, apart from his cricket genius is in his humility. Many of last decades' titans - from ICICI's Kamath to Infosys's Murthy are known for their humility as much as they are for their business acumen. It is, hence, worth pondering if - as a nation, as colleages, as companies, as a society, and mostly as individuals - we want to promote arrogance as a way of working or as a bevahiour which is encouraged.

Image from Facebook - credit unknown A couple of days back while having a lunch conversation with colleagues, I declared that Whatsapp may not survive primarily because there is no stickiness in the product. In case of social networks like Facebook, even if a new platform with some differentiating features comes up, your relationships are very difficult to migrate to another platform. Hence, users will not switch from one social network to another unless there is a generational shift in the features between the old and new one (ex. migration from Orkut to Facebook in India), because of the effort needed to migrate all relationships to the new network again. In fact, this is one of the reasons Google plus is finding it so difficult to grab users from Facebook even though critics claim that Google Plus has a better conceptualized social networking features.  However, P2P messaging apps like Whatsapp, Line or Viber - lack any such stickiness because the relationships reside in yo

New Yahoo Logo || Source: Razilabs Yahoo! has been a struggling tech giant for almost a decade now - especially since the rise of Google and later Facebook. Yahoo! which was the original haven for geeks and the Social Network cum a goto destination for everything else online in the 2000s has had to hire Google's ex-executive Marissa Mayer as its CEO to stay afloat. Recently, Yahoo revamped the UI for its (still) most relevant service Yahoo Mail along with a populist looking gift of 1 TB storage. Mayer was probably borrowing a page from her ex-employers' book by offering a bonanza storage along with some other features copied from its service GMail. As Times of India puts it: Yahoo's free email service is becoming a bit more like Google's Gmail as part of its second makeover in less than a year. The similarities to Gmail probably aren't coincidental. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer helped design some of Gmail's features while she was a top executive at Google

I was watching the movie Terminator Salvation on HBO today, when I realized that the movie's plot has so many parallels in today's context. The movie's plot revolves around (apart from John Connor), a cyborg Marcus Wright, who himself believes that he is human. He is sent by SkyNet (the evil brain of machines) to pull John Connor (the protagonist and purported savior of human race) into a trap. However, in the movie's climax, Marcus even after realizing his true identity of being a machine, sides with the humans assisting Connor in saving hostages in SkyNet's custody and also finally helping Connor destroy SkyNet. The plot of course, written to please the masses, takes an optimistic's view of which squad Marcus sides with upon being made aware of his identity as a machine. The plot assumes that Marcus sides, not with his identity but his beliefs - his belief in shared human values, in the "goodness" of human race and "evil" in machines