A nice article by Barkha Dutt

Barkha Dutt
Thursday, March 16, 2006

Taken from www.ndtv.com

Swimming in the sea of India’s cultural complexity has taught me that I can no longer carry my agnosticism lightly.

Time has convinced me that my resistance to institutionalised religion is the defining character flaw of the progressive elite; a discordant note in an otherwise full-throated symphony; a disconnect so deep that sometimes people like me are just left watching from the side lines at the tumultuous fight for India’s future; spectators, not participants because we speak the language of disbelief.

But there are times, I am grateful that I am neither Hindu nor Muslim, but just a devout skeptic. Right now, is one such.

Despite the lonely corner non -believers like myself inhabit, I am reasonably confident that the ordinary Indian is as mystified as me by the hysterical debate that has consumed our media these past few weeks.

The theme song, actually it was a duet, went something like this-Hindutva is simmering under the surface, waiting to leap out from the political grave into the warm embrace of a new life; and “moderate Muslims” must speak, not just speak, they must shout, scream, holler, be heard, so that there is no “backlash.”

Apparently, the horrific twin blasts at Varanasi have given all this the force of an emergency. If I were either Hindu or Muslim, I would be deeply insulted at the generalised and simplistic assumptions made about me, my intelligence, and most importantly, my faith.

On the evening of the blasts, Renuka Narayanan went on NDTV and said “Varanasi is to Hinduism what Mecca is to Islam, this is the seat of Hinduism that has been attacked.” I can still feel the slight shudder that went down my spine. The stakes seemed so high.

Gujarat 2002; New Delhi 1984, has made us forever fearful. The fear isn’t entirely misplaced; every terror attack, especially those targeted at the nerve centres of faith, pushes us that much closer to the edge; to the precipice of polarisation.

But the argument lapsed into absurdity, when the politicians began talking. If the Varanasi blasts were a consequence of the UPA’s “minority appeasement”, then how does one explain the shadow of terror that tailed India during the NDA regime? From Kandahar to the Parliament attack?

If the blasts were a result of this government being “soft on terror” then how does one explain that there is no empirical difference in the level of violence today, when compared with last year? And has a shrill BJP forgotten that Atal Behari Vajpayee’s lasting legacy is the creation of a peace process with Pakistan and a peace initiative with Kashmiri separatists?

Bihar was proof that the NDA is a combative, shrewd political force that the UPA cannot afford to be complacent about. But surely there was a lesson in it for the BJP as well- another state won not on the strength of religious mobilisation but on the promise of change.

Even the complex caste arithmetic could not save a Lalu Prasad Yadav; clearly identity politics could only travel this far, if governance and development were not equal companions on the journey.

So no matter what the public opinion pundits write (and I suspect, even the BJP’s master strategists may just have lifted the idea off the edit pages), I would argue that in the absence of an extraordinary event, religious identity is now more the EX-factor, than a decisive, intangible, X factor; Hindutva I think has served its time and outlived its political utility.

All generalizations are a gamble, but I would take the risk and say that Middle India (as distinct from both the fundamentalists and the liberals) wants to travel down the Middle Path; the age of shrill rhetoric is over, Indians, are increasingly impatient with extremism of any kind, in any faith, Hindu or Muslim.

I’m pretty sure that the ordinary Hindu, angry as he or she may be about the assault in Varanasi, and before that, Ayodhya, will also find L K Advani’s Rath Yatra disingenuous and unnecessary; a poor caricature of himself.

I’m equally sure, that if I were a Muslim in India today, I’d feel under siege; claustrophobically caught between those who claim to speak on my behalf, and those who are demanding that I must speak up as a “moderate.” Lost in the cacophony of argument is the clarity of exactly what we are asking them to speak up against.

If it’s about the politicians like Haji Yaqoob Qureshi, the minister in Uttar Pradesh who dared to declare a reward of Rs 51 crore for the Danish cartoonist’s head, Muslim after Muslim that I have interviewed has condemned him and asked that he be removed from the state government.

It’s a non-Muslim chief minister who continues to keep him in public office. It’s India’s party in power, the Congress, that continues to maintain a shameful silence on his utterances; the same Congress that will use textbook rules to secure a vindictive expulsion of Jaya Bachchan from Parliament is conveniently inert when it comes to Qureshi.

And it’s the Marxists, who need to march with Mulayam, who are silently looking the other way. So aren’t newspaper columnists framing the question incorrectly? Sure, there is a conspiracy of silence, but look who is not talking.

Or is it the anti-Bush protests that we are alarmed by and object to? Apparently the worry is that Indian Muslims are joining hands with the Global Islamic Community, if they march against Bush; that this heralds the ominous arrival of Political Islam at our doorstep. But isn’t this a wildly insecure, and mostly hysterical reaction?

First, the protests spoke for a fragment of Muslim opinion, and it would be presumptuous to assume that the protestors represented 14 million people.

Secondly, so what if they don’t like Bush? Why isn’t their right to protest legitimate? This weekend, on We the People, a cross section of Muslims made the same point: to oppose George Bush’s politics in Iraq is not the same thing as opposing a nuclear deal that’s clearly good for India.

To lose that distinction is to question the patriotism of the Indian Muslim, not just a dangerous argument, but also a deeply offensive one.

Mehbooba Mufti from Kashmir summed it up when she said the cause of an Independent Kashmir had been championed by Islamic militants from as far as Sudan and Afghanistan, but never by an Indian Muslim outside of the valley.

Are we becoming like the United States? Fearful of minorities? Alarmed at their assertion, superior and scornful about their conventions? Unable to see them as anything but the “other?”

Finally, are media clichés the biggest disservice at a time like this? What or who do we mean by a Moderate Muslim? Mohammed Ali Jinnah was barely a believer, hardly followed the Quran, but created Pakistan.

So who is “moderate” enough for us, and who sets the benchmarks? The day of the blasts, I got a call from a member of the Muslim Personal Law board, scared and worried about a “backlash”, wanting to condemn the blasts on national television, so that nobody misunderstood their response. The subtext is clear.

Fifty-nine years after India was born, in a country where there are more Muslims than there are in Pakistan, we are still asking Muslims to wear their nationalism like an identity card; we are still asking for proof of loyalty. This is not their failure. It is ours.

Cant help but praise her. !

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Three more ways to get into IIT

GATE Office conducts GATE, JMET, and CEED examinations for admission to postgraduate programmes

  

The Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) is an all-India examination administered and conducted in eight zones across the country jointly by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and seven Indian Institutes of Technology on behalf of the National Coordinating Board - GATE, Department of Education, Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD), Government of India. Admission to post graduate programmes with MHRD and some other government scholarship/assistantship at engineering colleges/institutes in the country are open to those who qualify through GATE.

Joint Management Entrance Test (JMET) is the first step in the process of admission to the TWO YEAR FULL TIME Postgraduate Degree Programmes in Management offered by IITs.

Common Entrance Examination for Design (CEED) is an all India examination conducted by IIT Bombay, on behalf of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. CEED is a qualifying examination for Admission to Master of Design (M.Des.) Programmes at IISc Bangalore, IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Guwahati and IIT Kanpur, and Ph.D. Programmes in Design in some Institutes.

Faster websites more reliable data

Today, visiting almost any major website — checking your Facebook news feed, looking for books on Amazon, bidding for merchandise on eBay — involves querying a database. But the databases that these sites maintain are enormous, and searching them anew every time a new user logs on would be painfully time consuming. To serve up data in a timely fashion, most big sites use a technique called caching. Their servers keep local copies of their most frequently accessed data, which they can send to users without searching the database.

But caching has an obvious problem: If any of the data in the database changes, the cached copies have to change too; moreover, any cached data that are in any way dependent on the changed data also have to change. Tracking such data dependencies is a nightmare for programmers, but even when they do their jobs well, problems can arise. For instance, says Dan Ports, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, suppose that someone is bidding on an item on eBay. The names of the bidders could be cached in one place, the value of their bids in another. Making a new bid updates the database, but as that update propagates through the network of servers, it could reach the value cache before it reaches the name cache. The bidder would see someone else’s name next to her bid and think she’d been beaten to the punch. “They might see their own bid attributed to somebody else,” Ports says, “and wind up in a bidding war with themselves.”

MIT researchers have developed a new caching system that eliminates this type of asymmetric data retrieval while also making database caches much easier to program. Led by Ports and his thesis advisor, Institute Professor Barbara Liskov, who won the 2008 Turing Award, the highest award in computer science, the research also involves associate professor Sam Madden, PhD student Austin Clements, and former master’s student Irene Zhang. Ports presented the system on Oct. 5 at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation in Vancouver.

Transact locally

Unlike existing database caching systems, Ports and Liskov’s can handle what computer scientists call transactions. A transaction is a set of computations that are treated as a block: None of them will be performed unless all of them are performed. “Suppose that you’re making a plane reservation, and it has two legs,” says Liskov. “You’re not interested in getting one of them and not the other. If you run this as a transaction, then the underlying system will guarantee that you get either both of them or neither of them. And it does this regardless of whether there are other concurrent accesses, or other users are trying to get seats on those flights, or there are machine failures, and so forth. Transactions are a well-understood technique in computer science to achieve this kind of functionality.” Indeed, it’s the idea of transactions that gives the new system its name: TxCache, where “Tx” is a shorthand for “transaction.”

TxCache also makes it easier for programmers to manage caches. “Existing caches have the approach that they just make this cache and tell the programmer, ‘Here’s a cache: You can put stuff in it if you want; you can get stuff out of it if you want,’” says Ports. “But figuring out how to do that is entirely up to you.” TxCache, however, recognizes that a computer program already implicitly defines the relationships between stored data. For instance, a line of code might say that Z = X + Y, which is an instruction to look up X, look up Y, and store their sum as Z. With TxCache, the programmer would simply specify that that line of code — Z = X + Y — should be cached, and the system would automatically ensure that, whenever any one of those variables changed, the cached copies of the other two would be updated, everywhere. And, of course, it can perform the same type of maintenance with more complicated data dependencies, represented by more complicated functions.

Bean counting

According to Liskov, the key to getting TxCache to work was “a lot of bookkeeping.” The system has to track what data are cached where, and which data depend on each other. Indeed, Liskov says, it was the fear that that bookkeeping would chew up too many computing cycles that dissuaded the designers of existing caching systems from supporting transactions. But, she explains, updating the caches is necessary only when data in the database change. Modifying the data is a labor-intensive operation; the bookkeeping steps are comparatively simple. “Yes, we are doing more work, but proportionally it’s very small,” Liskov says. “It’s on the order of 5 to 7 percent.” In the researchers’ experiments, websites were more than five times as fast when running TxCache as they were without it.

“The trouble with large-scale services like Bing and Amazon and Google and the like is that they operate at such a high level of scalability,” says Solom Heddaya, a partner at Microsoft and infrastructure architect for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. “On a single request from the user searching for something, there are many, many applications that get invoked in real time, and they together will use tens of thousands of servers.” On that scale, Heddaya says, some kind of caching system is necessary. But, he says, “until this paper came along, people building these systems said, ‘Hey, we will shift the burden to the programmer of the application. We will give you the convenience of caching, so that we bring the data closer to where the computation is, but we will make you worry about whether the cache has the right data.”

Heddaya cautions that, unlike some other caching systems, the MIT researchers’ offers significant performance improvements only for sites where reading operations — looking up data in the database — greatly outnumber writing operations — updating data in the databases. But according to Ports, “Adding support for using caching during read/write transactions is one of the things we're thinking about now. There aren't any major technical obstacles to doing so: It's mainly a question of how we can do so without introducing unexpected effects that make life more difficult for users and programmers.”

(Src: Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office)

BEL Bharat Electronics Limited

HISTORY

Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) was set up at Bangalore, India, by the Government of India under the Ministry of Defence in 1954 to meet the specialised electronic needs of the Indian defence services. Over the years, it has grown into a multi-product, multi-technology, multi-unit company serving the needs of customers in diverse fields in India and abroad . BEL is among an elite group of public sector undertakings which have been conferred the Navratna status by the Government of India.

The growth and diversification of BEL over the years mirrors the advances in the electronics technology, with which BEL has kept pace. Starting with the manufacture of a few communication equipment in 1956, BEL went on to produce Receiving Valves in 1961, Germanium Semiconductors in 1962 and Radio Transmitters for AIR in 1964.

In 1966, BEL set up a Radar manufacturing facility for the Army and in-house R&D, which has been nurtured over the years. Manufacture of Transmitting Tubes, Silicon Devices and Integrated Circuits started in 1967. The PCB manufacturing facility was established in 1968.

In 1970, manufacture of Black & White TV Picture Tube, X-ray Tube and Microwave Tubes started. The following year, facilities for manufacture of Integrated Circuits and Hybrid Micro Circuits were set up. 1972 saw BEL manufacturing TV Transmitters for Doordarshan. The following year, manufacture of Frigate Radars for the Navy began.

Under the government's policy of decentralization and due to strategic reasons, BEL ventured to set up new Units at various places. The second Unit of BEL was set up at Ghaziabad in 1974 to manufacture Radars and Tropo communication equipment for the Indian Air Force. The third Unit was established at Pune in 1979 to manufacture Image Converter and Image Intensifier Tubes.

In 1980, BEL's first overseas office was set up at New York for procurement of components and materials.

In 1981, a manufacturing facility for Magnesium Manganese Dioxide batteries was set up at the Pune Unit. The Space Electronic Division was set up at Bangalore to support the satellite programme in 1982. The same year saw BEL achieve a turnover of Rs.100 crores.

In 1983, an ailing Andhra Scientific Company (ASCO) was taken over by BEL as the fourth manufacturing Unit at Machilipatnam. In 1985, the fifth Unit was set up in Chennai for supply of Tank Electronics, with proximity to HVF, Avadi. The sixth Unit was set up at Panchkula the same year to manufacture Military Communication equipment. 1985 also saw BEL manufacturing on a large scale Low Power TV Transmitters and TVROs for the expansion of Doordarshan's coverage.

1986 witnessed the setting up of the seventh Unit at Kotdwara to manufacture Switching Equipment, the eighth Unit to manufacture TV Glass Shell at Taloja (Navi Mumbai) and the ninth Unit at Hyderabad to manufacture Electronic Warfare Equipment.

In 1987, a separate Naval Equipment Division was set up at Bangalore to give greater focus to Naval projects. The first Central Research Laboratory was established at Bangalore in 1988 to focus on futuristic R&D.

1989 saw the manufacture of Telecom Switching and Transmission Systems as also the setting up of the Mass Manufacturing Facility in Bangalore and the manufacture of the first batch of 75,000 Electronic Voting Machines.

The agreement for setting up BEL's first Joint Venture Company, BE DELFT, with M/s Delft of Holland was signed in 1990. Recently this became a subsidiary of BEL with the exit of the foreign partner and has been renamed BEL Optronic Devices Limited.

The second Central Research Laboratory was established at Ghaziabad in 1992. The first disinvestment (20%) and listing of the Company's shares in Bangalore and Mumbai Stock Exchanges took place the same year.

BEL Units obtained ISO 9000 certification in 1993-94. The second disinvestment (4.14%) took place in 1994. In 1996, BEL achieved Rs.1,000 crores turnover.

In 1997, GE BEL, the Joint Venture Company with M/s GE, USA, was formed. In 1998, BEL set up its second overseas office at Singapore to source components from South East Asia.

The year 2000 saw the Bangalore Unit, which had grown very large, being reorganized into Strategic Business Units (SBUs). There are seven SBUs in Bangalore Unit. The same year, BEL shares were listed in the National Stock Exchange.

In 2002, BEL became the first defence PSU to get operational Mini Ratna Category I status. In June 2007, BEL was conferred the prestigious Navratna status based on its consistent performance.

During 2008-09, BEL recorded a turnover of Rs.4624 crores.



src: bel-india.com

Kapil sibal

Human Resource Developement Minister

Wonder carbon pioneers win Physics Nobel

Russian born scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Physics Prize for their pioneering work on GRAPHENE - touted as wonderful material of 21st century.
 
Both laureates began their career as physicists in Russia but now work at the university of Manchester in Britain.
Just one atom thick, it is the world's thinnest n strongest nano material, almost transparent and able to conduct electricity n heat..

Graphene transistors in theory be cake to run at faster speeds and cope with higher temperatures than today's computer chips.

Transparency means it could potentially be used in touch screens n even solar cells..... Also for next gen satellites, planes, cars..