Anna Hazare, who leads the protest, with all his strength and faith has achieved something...

I don't know whether this is the same with everyone, but at least for me, he has proved the Gandhian way is still something that works even in 2011.

And the recent reactions by some Indian politicians does seem to prove... majority of politicians in India want to see the country developed and corruption free... just like the rest of us. I always thought not more than a handful of them would want that for India.

Unfortunate for all the good politicians, we are stuck with the British colonization style of laws and government model, which were forced on us by the British to keep us weak... and changing a truck load of all that (importantly how government offices should work) is taking time.

I always believed current generation of Indians will bring in change, and the old-modellish generations will be replaced with the newer generation people, and India will have its day.

But, the change is already here. And the old generation of people seem to want it as much as the new ones. Probably everyone was waiting for a revolution.. very true there is always a time things happen. It is now.

Anna and the Lokpal.. just a beginning of things to come?

What are your thoughts?

On a side note: Sony pix played the film 'Gandhi' today.. to go with the timing of Anna Hazare's protest and recent developments I think, and the film which all these days looked only like a history film, today felt very different.

Later when learning about his involvement with Nehru, the constitution, and all, I got to understand he was actually a North-Indian, but his actions made him a celebrity around India... especially the idealogies of uplifting lower class by caste quota in education and employment policies... called "Reservation".. what is one of the chiefly argued topics even today.

I am still strangely surprised that there has been a person who is celebrated all around the country, and he never got something sort of a media attention or publicity... but only became a celebrity, due to fondness because of his thoughts and actions helping people later. Sir.Ambedkar seems to have had an interesting amount of Futuristic vision in law and political thought.

Even today, if somebody threw a stone on an Ambedkar statue there will be a riot. And people raise statues for him without thinking twice that he was not one of them or one of their caste.. etc., How is that?

Finally... after a long long long delay.

It should have happened when America decided to re-elect Bush.. as his first term itself killed America's economy enough.. with Bush busily spending lots of money into policies like 2% housing loan subsidies, high health spending for the public.. etc.,.. to cover up for what he did on the other side, leading a war which was eating many billions in expenses.

It should have been done when America went to war .. with Iraq ???
At least you could explain why they went to war with Afganisthan, as a reaction to September 11... but Iraq? What interest was that to bring Saddam and his men down in a distant country with all your economic reserves committed on that war, when the reserves were already going of like quick sand

It should have at least been downgraded when America hit a no-return recession which claimed all America's who's who in Mortgage, Banking and Investment corps.
And American government, with all those intelligent guys there, committed extraordinary amount of money to bring back these bankrupt companies back on foot... with nobody, just no bad money hungry company boss brought to justice for having managed things badly(read 'greedily) to pull the entire country's economy down.

And still not withstanding any economic sense, instead of pulling up the sack of money and starting to fill it, Obama committed a large amount in public health policies than what was already a high amount committed by Bush before him.. just to score political points.

After all this.. it would be funny, if they didn't see this coming.. the downgrade of their economic credit rating from AAA to AA+.

.. and even now some people are talking like it was Deven Sharma, an Indian American who is to blame for America's downgrade. Deven Sharma, is Indian-by-birth, President of the rating enterprise S&P which downgraded American bonds.

As I grew up I realized that except Indian texts, not anyone else was referring to us or even hinting of using the word 'sub-continent' .. then I thought probably we Indians coined it ourselves for covering the differences our people have, and converted it into an USP.

The same thoughts came by, when I read 'Unity in Diversity' at school .. and afterwards felt whether we say that probably to hide our conflicts of not going well between different states.

Only recently, have I had opportunity to jump outside TamilNadu on to different states to see for myself ...the diversity we have... and if there was any Unity deep inside that diversity.

I am relieved I was not cheated at school... we do have conflicts between states or people from different states within the country.. but we do respect other people's traditions and give importance to our own traditions, and that's why we allow the diversity to exist. Slowly, there is a generation of people (include me), who think diversity should be within home and outside we are to think like indians, not Tamilians or Bangaloreans, or Maharashtrians. May be that would be against the idea of sub-continent.

I have not travelled vastly, but only to Darjeeling in the North-east, to Kerala in the south which were different worlds as compared to Hyderabad, Chennai or Bangalore.

The impact of growth in cities like Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore has almost made every other place in the states TamilNadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, such that even villages have a pacy lifestyle growth interests by making all cultivable lands into houses or commercial centers.

But, Darjeeling being a small hill-station, its people still fighting to be separated from being part of WestBengal, had a different walk of life in more traditional similarity with neighbours like China, Nepal, Bhutan, than India.

Darjeeling and almost all parts of Kerala gave me a sense of visiting a foreign place. Rich with green, people not just wearing but also looking their traditional ways.

I think I also got to understand why frequent travellers and globe-trotters say that just visiting places educated them about living a good life, and made them more nicer with people... I always thought they were covering their mistake of doing nothing else but just touring by saying those things.

I sometimes wonder, if all humanity arose from somewhere in Africa as they say, and later migrated to different parts of land which became countries and states because of rulers, how did differences in cultures, traditions, and even languages come about.

While your train enters from a neighbouring state into Kerala, you can tell that it has entered without requiring any information boards. Its just green everywhere, and less populated except for Cities like Cochin or Trivandrum I guess. I definitely didn't so much people as I would have in any place on Tamilnadu or even Maharashtra.

While entire North India's cities look very much like Chennai or Bangalore or Hyderabad in population and development, there is a different air of thought, pace of life, and cultural differences embedded into how people talk to one another or foods in north india very different from the south.

... oh Yes, yes, Indian politicians always looted money.. I should have gotten into Economics long back, but..

but now they are doing it in the open,
to keep everyone excited,
to make everyone understand the big numbers, the fundas..
and come on.. this is also a sign of India growing into an economic super power ?

--

I will try to interest you also to read Economics .. by sharing something I learnt today.

In 1995, ING Bank, a Dutch Bank, purchased an entire Bank called Barings Bank, for one pound.. that should be about 65 Rupees in indian currency in 1995 I think.

And Barings Bank was not some stupid bank.. it was a huge bank, operating billions of dollars, having offices in Singapore, london etc., and one of the few banks that had succesfully survived the world wars I & II and also the Great Depression of the 1920's.

Related links:
Barings Bank - on Wikipedia (Check the AfterMath section in the big article for the one Pound sale related note)

That is correct. only 5% of their citizens are known to have employment.
That's not all the numbers.. with Robert Mugabe as the president and also the military chief for as long as citizen's knew independence .. you should not be surprised.

So you wonder what the 95% unemployed do?.. the obvious... fight for food.. increase food demand so high that zimbabwe's inflation number is many many thousands (231,000,000%).

If that sounds disturbing you should read more about Zimbabwe,

its people,
how Robert Mugabe keeps the entire country in his grips,
what has the so called United Nations, and all those big shot country clubs been doing still on Mugabe.

Related links:
Uemployment rate of countries

Zimbabwe - on Wikipedia

Zimbabwe's Economy - on Wikipedia

Is Mugabe the real problem in Zimbabwe - on The Times 2008

Its been a month since I relocated to Pune in Central india.. to try working from outside Chennai, my Home, atleast once. I wouldn't say work / accomodation and food have been good so far.. but haven't been bad.

Though its been a month since I relocated to Pune, I haven't had much of a chance to explore Pune. I compare the place I stay as something like Adyar in Chennai, and the place I work as something like deep Old mahabalipuram road in chennai.

If you know chennai.. you would understand that neither adyar or the deep old mahabalipuram road areas give any idea of Chennai at all. Most of Chennai is in TNagar / Mount Road. The same with my experience with Pune. I have had a couple of chances to visit Laxmi Road in Pune which I compare to TNagar.. but otherwise I haven't had any idea of Pune really so far.. and I hope that Pune is not just what I have seen so far.. because what I have seen so far hasn't been interesting.

Pune, as I understand so far, has a very dominant Maharashtrian population, and is only a developing city, though its aggressively growing. Cost of living is high here.. but I guess I haven't seen Pune's options to cost of living so far.

More on my experiences with Pune .. as I explore.

...aircraft pollution above North America and Europe -- where air travel is heaviest -- adversely impacts air quality in India and China. That is, even though the amount of fuel burned by aircraft over India and China accounts for only 10 percent of the estimated total amount of fuel burned by aircraft across the globe, the two countries incur nearly half -- about 3,500 -- of the annual deaths related to aircraft cruise emissions. The analysis also revealed that although every country in the Northern Hemisphere experienced some number of fatalities related to these emissions, almost none of the countries in the Southern Hemisphere had fatalities.

This report is possibly yet to be reported on Indian newspapers.

A popular online magazine FastCompany, on its website says,

... perhaps everyone involved should spend more time researching low-emissions biofuels for future flights...

Watch these videos:

Future of books

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Future ATM

The Future of Self-Service Banking from IDEO on Vimeo.

You might also know that a dual-core processor based computer is supposed to work faster than a normal computer.

Its all about the old concept we all read at the Maths class..
If 10 people can complete a job in 10 days, how much time will it take for 20 people to do the same job ??

As you know putting more people at it, would make many things either go faster or fatter with more capacity to do two day's work in just one day.

On the same lines, computer chips / microprocessors can also do things faster when you put two together to do the job (as in Dual core), or four together (as in Quadra core).. the idea is old. It is called parallel computing.. quantum computing.. and all those SuperComputers you have heard off have thousands of chips in parallel like Thousand-core or something. I hope you can imagine that..

For some reason, we have not done this much on ourselves. humans. Atleast not much in software development.
Yes, in a project, an increase in the number of human resources for completing a work, is a normal thing.. but all those people never do the same work.. they take pieces.. that I would say is equivalent to serial computing, not parallel.. and later joining these pieces requires some additional effort... and also the management effort doubles up to manage more people working on the project than it was actually intended when it was started.

I got inspired of the idea of "Pair programming" from Agile development concepts in software.

If you are a non-techie guy, bear with me on the below block of explanation... I will soon explain the equivalent of the same in a non-techie process to make it clear.

If we asked 2 or more programmers of a software to sit together on one computer desk and complete what is assigned to one programmer.. the result might be interesting for various reasons.
1. Since 2 programmers are together, they will complement each other on their weaknesses .. and add up on their strengths.. which might become hugely positive.
2. They might learn from each other quicker than books, quicker than meetings, quicker than sitting on different computers even if next to each other
3. They might end up doing the same job with more than 2 times better quality and productivity than if they did pieces of it separately on their desks.
4. This "IS" real teamwork.. rather than working alone and then getting together in a hotel as a team.

Like so, If we can increase the number of parallel people, what would happen then?

We have seen the advantages already.. Where ?

Like in a Hospital's operation theatre, 3 doctors talking to each other and working on the same patient .. sometimes the doctors specialize in different areas pertaining to the same operation. It helps.. Where one doctor's scope of knowledge ends.. the other doctor adds-up, and when one doctor is tired.. the other helps.. and like that. This is already done in operations that are critical / those that take a long time.

Like in a Formula 1 race pit, where about 12 or more people work on a car for a few seconds .. doing almost a small vehicle service thing.. from Changing the Tyre, Re-fuelling, refreshing the driver, to wiping the car shining clean.

Like at a beauty parlour some women would get two three people working on her at the same time.. like one doing the pedicure / manicure, one doing the facials, etc.,

Where else can this be useful if applied well?

More than one teacher at every Math / Chemistry class .. one teaching a theorem, and the others distributed around the class taking special care sitting with some weak students and working with them right there. Imagine !!
It will also help the teachers.. like sharing the session and each one getting time off the board and sit with students. Personal education is going to be "The thing" going forward.. given the amount of stuff children need to learn to come to speed of technology and science today.

More than one government services office at each district / region, like two Transport / license registrar offices at the same place, Two Registration offices at the same place, Two government hospitals at the same place, like that.. providing parallel services, encouraging / addressing more demand.

Can you think of something else.. where putting more people at it could be useful ?

One, a friend, to the Sooriya hospital in chennai..
Another, a friend's father, to the Ramachandra hospital in chennai.

The rest of this post is to help people who research the internet for high bp related problems.. and I am not going to be able to write it medically correct.. I am a total outsider to medicine and related terms and read the remaining post only as some starter information.

Ok.

I hadn't known that High BP ... eventually can become so acute that it shoots out so much blood to the brain and the brain either tries to expand a little or starts oozing out the excess blood.. both causing blackout initially and could lead to critical illness.

In my friend's father's case, thanks to the Ramachandra hospital staff, doctors and miracles.. the person was well moved into surgery on time.. the surgery involved breaking open the scalp and removing a chunk of bone and closing off.. This the doctor has explained to my friend that .. it will allow the brain to expand a little if the BP shoots up again in the near future.. and the patient will buy some time to get back his BP back to control with the numerous parameters and health aspects that affect BP.

In my knowledge of BP, I think controlling the BP of a person is not a quick thing.. and it takes a lot of measures, right from food, to controlling emotions, to managing heart rate etc.., though there are emergency medicines to increase or decrease BP temporarily for a short period.

Now, my friend's father is doing well, except that my friend is little worried and disturbed that the process of taking away a bone chunk from the head, has left his father's head shape slightly maligned or dipping inside in the area.

...

Now, in the other case, the friend at sooriya hospital who had similar problems.. was reported to have things controlled without a surgery.. as per hospital's scan reports and doctor's analysis.

After a few days at hospital, and condition not improving .. the friend's relatives suspected that they might have to try with a better hospital and hurriedly moved him to apollo one night.

Apollo which is usually famous for its emergency care being good.. hasn't been able to do much after so much time after the initial problem.. and it became too late for the patient.. who eventually passed away.

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Be in control of your health, keep checking your BP, heart rates and do those normal health checkup tests regularly.. so things don't go out of hand.

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Thanks for Reading. This post is purely written only assuming that somebody searching for information on 'High BP' on the internet from chennai, might like to know this. As said before, I could have been very incorrect on a lot of things said above in the post. Please excuse.