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Best of AnthoBLOGy • Unripe
Revolution |
Computing, Libraries, Tennis, India & other interests of Vikas Kamat
| Google to the Rescue |  | ||
| Google to the Rescue Thank you Google (first heard via a private message), for understanding my email problems. The announcement seems unbelievable, and initially I thought was a April Fool's prank. It still might be. Anyway, let's restart the portal wars. I'd pay money to use my.google.com. I'd even pay to reserve the email address vikas_kamat
Merged Blogs Many years ago, I implemented a merged blog idea (multiple blog entires by multiple authors merged into one page) at Kamat's Potpourri. Today a new service Kinja is launched that takes the idea into a new height. (via Megnut)very cool.
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| Mangalya and Widowhood | | ||
| Status of Widows in India Today I started reading S.L.Bhyrappa's classic Kannada novel "Gruhabhanga". I love Bhyrappas' writing, because of his profound understanding of Indian philosophies, and his own very harsh experiences of Hindu life. This one begins with a thirty-one year old widow taking her son to task for not studying. The fifteen year old son, in response, tells his own mother - "You let me be Munde! (a derogatory word for a widow), otherwise I am going to ask Rudra the barber to shave your head!" The incident was so troubling due to my own experiences of witnessing the injustice meted to the widows, I had to stop reading and reminiscence. Of course, the novel is set at a time in India where becoming a widow was considered the worst of a woman's crimes. You know, I do not believe much has changed since. Tonsuring of the head might not be as common, although below is a photograph taken in year 2001 -- widows will not even agree to be photographed, due to social stigma. © K. L. Kamat In my childhood in village India, the above scene was a common sight. The kids had been told that the sight of a widow was ominous and many a times, they would spit and curse at her for what bad luck she might bring. In our cloth-shop in Honavar, we had a large shelf of sarees meant just for widows. There were only two choices: plain white, or plain red. Within my own family, there were widows. My grandma was a widow, and while she did not shave her head or wear mono-color, she did not attend any family functions, including the weddings of many her children. Much to the credit of Kamat family, Kaki was treated with affection and respect, and we did not tolerate anyone hurling an insult at her. My mother is a widow now, and I cannot imagine how can it ever be any of her fault that my father is no more?!
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| India's First IT Guru | | ||
| India's First IT Guru S.R. Rangathanan I consider N.V. Satyanarayana, Managing Director of Informatics, as the father of electronic library science in India. And it was Satyanarayana who first told me about S.R. Ranganathan, the father of library sciences in India. I then took interest in the life and works of Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, and I find Ranganathan to be a great inspirational personality. Yet, not many within India have heard his name. But everybody has heard of his principles: "Every man his book" said he, and "Every book its reader". © Vikas Kamat IMO, Ranganathan was way ahead of his time. He was India's first IT guru. A mathematician by education (B.A. and M.A. in Mathematics), he thought deeply about information organization and classifications. He proposed what is today known as the "Colon Classification System", which is fundamentally different and IMO, fundamentally superior than the more established classification systems (Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal System). For programmers of today, colon classification is analogous to the object-oriented model, where ability to change and adapt is built in. Ranganathan was subject to many a hardships in the hands of government and administration, and was repeatedly denied opportunities due to his caste. He finally had to resign his job at the Madras University. But his ideas were recognized by many scholars in Europe and in USA who saw the merits of a future-proof content classification system. Ranganathan died in 1972 in Bangalore. Ranganathan's multi-faceted classification ideas have found wide-ranging applications in modern computer science -- from naming of reusable software components to categorizing web content. That's why I am calling him India's first IT guru. See Also:
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| Tippu's Sword | | ||
| Tippu's Sword The caption for Tippu Sultan's sword in our PICTURESearch says that it is a great collector's item among Westerners. Correction, it is a great collector's item among wealthy Indians (Link to Indian Express). IMO, there is not one Tippu Sultan's sword, but several that are in circulation. The pictures in our collection were taken during a CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation, a federal agency) raid. Here is a picture showing the details on it. Apparently, this is a different one.
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| Roundup of Indian Weblogs | | ||
| A Roundup of Indian Weblogs (This is neither the mela, nor the kela)
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| Tanenbaum Goes to India | | ||
| The Great Indian Election Spectable This is election week in India and the whole nation is in high gear for the elections (link to BBC).
Tanenbaum Goes to India Many wonderful photographs of India by Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum. (link first seen on a comment)
Contradictions abound: great beauty and horrible ugliness, tremendous wealth and abject poverty, super modern and extremely traditional. The only constant was the friendliness of the people everywhere I went.
• Extreme Nation -- The Contradictions of India
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| Google GMail | | ||
| Google's GMail People who criticize Google's Gmail, don't get it. The excitement is two folded. First it solves a fundamental problem for me, which is "..it takes longer for me to search my InBox than to search the whole Web". Second, for those of us who feel choked by Microsoft computing, Google offers a ray of hope that it is indeed possible to compete against Microsoft. I don't care for the privacy debate, yet I do understand what they are saying. Perhaps Google could charge for the service without delivering ads. I'd pay $100/year for it. (I am a paying customer, and a heavy user of Yahoo Mail)
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| Misc Stuff | | ||
| My regrets for the lack of updates here. I have been busy losing tennis matches (link to 0-5 USTA record), and earning a living.
Amma takes a very sympathetic look at ancient Indian works of Manu. He is the Hindu sage who laid the code of conduct that determined the status of women in Indian society for centuries. At one place he has said that "the woman is not worthy of freedom", in another place, he says "Gods live only where women are revered". The feminists have long made a career of condemning Manu, but Amma provides some fresh perspectives.
I do not want to subscribe to the opinion that blog posts should live forever. My database is getting full so I am thinking of what to do with older, insignificant entries. Some Ideas: I have already started the process.. Browse Blogs now has deep links to every entry. It can be browsed by AnthoBLOGy or Amma's Column. Old entries sometimes do make interesting reading. For instance see the first month of AnthoBLOGy.
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