Yesterday I visited Elephanta Caves which are beautifully carved shiv temples out of solid rock mountain. These caves dates back to 5-7 century A.D. You can reach there by a ferry from Gate Way of India, Bombay. The ferry ride was awesome with beautiful view of sea, Gate way of India, Taj hotel and mountains along with refreshing and cool breeze.
For more pics check my picasa album
I read this interesting article by Bernard on State of Inovation in India. I agree with him that lot have changed (improved) but still we have yet to see Google/Microsoft from here(IITs). As he mentioned one of the main reason is playing things safe.
The fundamental issue in India is the risk/reward equation. It is simply too easy for a young developer in India to get paid a lot by an outsourcing firm; then enjoy being headhunted every year for more money.
There are many socio economic reasons why young people in India hesitate to implement an innovative idea. Current trend of high paying jobs in MNCs will make entrepreneurship ever lesser attractive... especially in software.
Economic Times: Broadband to go free in 2 yrs
Economic Times:
The government proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-owned telecom service providers BSNL and MTNL. While consumers would cheer, the move holds the potential to kill the telecom business as we know it.Read disscussion regarding this on Slashdot.
Last night we lost out internet connection(includeing LAN)...which now we will have ot face everyday from 11PM to 12:30 PM.
Read more about it..
Register Put down the internet and go get some fresh air
Techdirt: Indian Engineering Students To Have Internet Cut Off Each Night To Encourage More Social Interaction
CNN : Stop surfing, make friends, Indian students तोल्ड
Update :
IBN Live :will web restriction help??
"India has the most number of billionaires in Asia with a total wealth of $191bn between them, according to Forbes magazine. With 36 billionaires, India has overtaken Japan's 24 billionaires, after two decades of Japan topping the Asian rich list."
Forbes' 2007 ranking of worlds richest.
An interesting article by Mark Rais on role of open source in making education available to the large youth population of india. And a greta initiative by CII-Shiksha.
To support more than 650,000 villages and one half billion youths who need education, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) created a nonprofit organization called Shiksha India in 2001. One of Shiksha's primary initiatives was the creation of a collaborative online Web portal, which the president of India launched in a formal ceremony last month. The new e-learning and collaboration portal uses open source technology such as Moodle, Drupal, and MediaWiki.
"The bad side is that with so much available, a newcomer to OSS is bound to get confused about what to use." He says this is often exacerbated due to some projects being fixated on proving that their product is best.Other than that at present, their are linux distributons like Ubuntu, which is quite user friendly and its available in many flavours. Also earlier there has also been efforts in shifting towards linux and other open source mediums like :
Times of India group has started “India Poised” campaign in honor of 60 years of free India.
India Poised Anthem :
continued >>There are two Indias in this country
One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives the world has been showering recently upon us
The other India is the leash
One India says give me a chance and I’ll prove myself. The other India says prove yourself first and then maybe you’ll have a chance
 | Watch Amitabh Bachchan recite the ‘India Poised’ anthem  View clip Download |
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The project celebrated its official launch today at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay. The launch is part of Asia’s largest technology festival held in Mumbai – Techfest. Now in its tenth year, the two day festival offers a smattering of workshops, exhibitions and lectures to students to explore advances and opportunities in modern science and technology.
Mr. Joichi Ito [Chairman, Creative Commons]
Dr. Catharina Maracke [Creative Commons, Global Coordinator]
Mr. Nandu Pradhan [President and Managing Director, Red Hat, India]
Mr. Shuddhabrata Sengupta [Sarai-CSDS]
Prof. Deepak Phatak [KReSIT, IIT Bombay]
Mr. Ito will speak about the importance of Creative Commons for a growing global digital culture in light of the launch of the Indian creative commons jurisdiction on January 26th. The intimate interaction between technology, law and culture in digital products is creating new challenges for enterprises, individuals and other organizations. How is the digital landscape getting altered with the emergence of licenses such as creative commons?For more information about this project and its launch, visit CC-India’s website. To learn more about this year’s Techfest, click here.
When an Indian state government wanted to acquire the land of farmers for building a Special Economic Zone, the farmers used satellite pictures from Google Earth to prove their land is fertile.
After the cola ban it is now the turn of Microsoft to log out of Kerala. Children in 12500 high schools in the state will not be taught Windows. Instead instructors are lining up Linux for them. Kerala has 99.9% Literacy.
read more | digg story
After allegations of high levels of toxic chemicals in their subcontinental sodas, the companies face bans amid a media uproar. Welcome to the India installment of the fabled cola wars. Global soft-drink heavies Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are actually on the same side. In short, this is shaping up to be a public-relations calamity of the first order.
read more | digg story
All of LIC's 2,048 branches, 100 divisional offices, seven zonal offices, head office and subsidiary offices will be covered by the deployment. Along with this all of LIC�s desktops will also simultaneously be converted to Linux. Approximately 60,000 users and five to six thousand servers will migrate to RHEL.
read more | digg story
"On the directions of the government of India, Indian ISPs have started censoring and blocking web properties. This was first noticed by Indian bloggers and upon inquiring with their respective ISPs, the actions are confirmed. Unfortunately, Blogspot and TypePad are the targets till now."There's an ongoing discussion of the censorship on GoogleGroups. The rediff.com coverage linked above indicates that the blocking is based on a list issued by India's Department of Telecommunications.
An Indian rocket veered off course after takeoff Monday, scuttling the launch of an Indian satellite that was to be used for broadcasting television signals and transmitting data, media reported."Things have gone wrong at the separation stage. We have to analyze the data (to know) why it went wrong," the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, G. Madhavan Nair, was quoted as saying by Press Trust of India news agency.
"An NYT op-ed on The Myth of the New India reports that only 1.3M Indians are participating in the so-called new economy of BPO, leaving 400M have-nots without a piece of the pie. Despite recent gains, nearly 380M Indians still live on less $1 a day, setting the stage for rural and urban conflict."
From the article: "No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already."
A Dollar fetches a lot of things in India, and i'm surprised that a lot has been assumed and written about without checking the facts. as of today, a dollar equals about Ruppees 45.84 (that was yesterday's rates). a Dollar fetches a lot of stuff, in fact i will give 2 examples - one for the metropolitan poor man with a dollar and the poor man in the rural indiaSource : Slashdot
Fueled by high-octane growth, the world's largest democracy is becoming a global power. Why the world will never be the same
Even if you have never gone to India--never wrapped your food in a piping-hot naan or had your eyeballs singed by a Bollywood spectacular--there is a good chance you encounter some piece of it every day of your life. It might be the place you call (although you don't know it) if your luggage is lost on a connecting flight, or the guys to whom your company has outsourced its data processing. Every night, young radiologists in Bangalore read CT scans e-mailed to them by emergency-room doctors in the U.S. Few modern Americans are surprised to find that their dentist or lawyer is of Indian origin, or are shocked to hear how vital Indians have been to California's high-tech industry. In ways big and small, Indians are changing the world.
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FLOSS is behind an Indian Web site that brings together farmers and agricultural experts to exchange ideas and information.
Thanks to work done by the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Bombay) and its partners, IT-savvy and knowledge-hungry people across rural India now can find relevant, demand-driven farming knowledge on the aAqua.org Web site. So far, the site has been a great way to bring together people such as Prasad Kaledhonkar, who has a clue about what the white patterns emerging on tomato plant leaves are; farmer's daughter Niyatee Nilesh, who wants advice on buying agricultural land; and Shirish, from rural Maharashtra, who wants to learn about using waste water from the school kitchen to irrigate gardens and crops. Read More>>
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