Desi In Toronto

I have updated my About page…..and hopefully my procrastination will ebb a bit and I will add more to the page…….

This presidency is, I think, for democrats all the way….and here is why I think so…….

In the 2000 presidential primary campaign, 10,371 absentee ballots were requested. Four years later, there were 9,600 requests.

And this year? More than 40,000 — just in the Cincinnati area, part of an unprecedented early and absentee voting pattern across the state.

It is in part due to aggressive pushes by both Democratic campaigns. Some Barack Obama campaign ads end with information about early voting, and to visit his Cincinnati campaign headquarters is to see an effort both to get voters to cast their ballots early and on a call-and-rides list for next Tuesday.

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“More people are telling us they are going to be voting in the Democratic primary,” Eric Rademacher, associate director of the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati tells CNN.

“And when we look at our polls over time, we are seeing a little bit of a dip in the number of people who are self identifying as Republicans.”

By the numbers, Republicans have a serious case of what you might call turnout trouble.

Excluding caucuses, some 22 million Democratic votes have been cast in the primaries held to date. For Republicans, the number is 14.1 million.

Is it just me or is this a re-run of the final season of The West Wing?

Here is the first clip

And here is the answer

What’s frightening about this is that I totally agree with 90% of what he said :

This definitely qualifies as the site of the day!! Let the applet load and have fun. From the mission statement :

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

“Harvesting human emotions”. Isn’t that an awesome idea? I think I am going to spend some time on this site and I hope to come across some fabulous blog!!

……why do we have a prayer in the legislature?

McGuinty’s move has left more than a few citizens and politicians peeved. Reactions ranged from those advocating that the prayer should be kept not necessarily as a nod to Christianity but in recognition of Ontario’s heritage; to those who would outlaw religious expression in the public square altogether; to people who believe Canada is a Christian country that must retain its Christian flavour.

Some would alternate the prayer with invocations from other faiths, while others have wondered whether the Lord’s Prayer is ecumenical in spirit. How can anyone object to its universal teachings and ideals?

Let’s see how you fare out…..I got 60%

So all those questions about arming space have been answered now……

The stunning image of a Navy missile streaking into outer space at 6,000 mph to obliterate an orbiting spy satellite boosts the credibility of missile-defense advocates. Yet questions remain whether that success could be duplicated against a surprise, real-world attack.

The idea, whether the target is an unarmed satellite or an enemy missile, is basically the same: fire a guided missile into the path of the moving target and smash it to bits by the force of impact. In theory, the collision could render harmless even a nuclear- or chemical-armed missile, an idea that evolved from President Reagan’s “star wars” program of the 1980s.

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SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (CNN) — The senior at the University of Utah gets dressed and then decides which gun is easiest to conceal under his clothes.

If he’s wearing a T-shirt, he’ll take a smaller, low-profile gun to class. If he’s wearing a coat, he may carry a different weapon, he said.

He started carrying a gun to class after the massacre at Virginia Tech, but the student says he’s not part of the problem of campus shootings and could instead be part of a solution.

Nick, who asked not to be fully identified so his fellow students wouldn’t know he carried a gun, he says he has had a concealed weapons permit for more than three years. But it was Seung-Hui Cho’s murderous campus rampage that made him take a gun to class.

“Last year, after Virginia Tech, I thought ‘I’m not going to be a victim,’ ” Nick said.

“My first thought was ‘how tragic.’ But then I couldn’t help but think it could’ve been different if they’d allowed the students the right to protect themselves.”

….and also if any punk talks to his girlfriend, he can settle this the old fashioned way, by calling him out to a duel and shooting the living sh*t out of him. What a moronic law. Young hot headed adults allowed to carry guns. What’s next, anti aircraft gun system in your home to ward off birds sh*tting on the roof of your house?

As you go through this blog you will notice that there is one that really irks me about India. The repeated and hyped up lines “India is shinning”, “India is the new superpower” or “India is the world’s largest democracy” grate on my nerves each time I hear it. People who mouth these lines obligingly, are the ones who are living comfortably in their apartments/condos while earning a decent salary completely oblivious or willfully ignore the huge number of disenfranchised fellow Indians who go about their lives eating mango kernels for sustainment. That is the real picture. Yes, it’s true that in some sectors of the population India is doing quite well….but how can one make big claims without understanding that most of the claims are just empty rhetoric.

Here is a case of State gone mad. This is a story of a doctor who, like Gandhi, gives up everything for the sake of helping other people. His story is of encouragement, inspiration and ultimately, in the “world’s largest democracy”, disillusionment.

The story of Binayak Sen is the story of the dangerously thin ice India’s democratic rights skim on. The story of every dangerous schism in India today: State versus people. Urban versus rural. Unbridled development versus human need. Blind law versus natural justice. It is the story of an India unraveling at the seams. The story of unjust things that happen — unreported — to thousands of innocent people, the story of unjust things waiting to happen to you and me, if we ever step off the rails of shining India to investigate what’s happening in the rest of the country. Most of all, it is the story of what can be done to ordinary individuals when the State dons the garb of being under siege

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OVER THE YEARS, Binayak’s medical work had morphed into social advocacy — the two umbilically linked in a state like Chhattisgarh. As Dr Suranjan Bhattacharji, director, CMC Vellore, says, “Binayak walked the talk. He was an inspiration for generations of doctors. He stirred us. He reminded us that it takes many things — access, freedom, food security, shelter, equity and justice — to make a healthy society. He was the alternative model.” In 2004, CMC honoured Binayak with its prestigious Paul Harrison Award. In a moving citation, it said, “Dr Binayak Sen has carried his dedication to truth and service to the very frontline of the battle. He has broken the mould, redefined the possible role of the doctor in a broken and unjust society, holding the cause much more precious than personal safety. CMC is proud to be associated with Binayak Sen.”

Yet, barely three years later, on May 14, 2007, in a Kafkaesque twist, the State pressed a button and deleted Binayak Sen’s long and dedicated history as a humanist and doctor. The police arrested him as a dreaded Naxal leader and charged him with sedition, criminal conspiracy, making war against the nation, and knowingly using the proceeds of terrorism (sic). Imagine the bewilderment. “Just a namesake doctor” the prosecution asserted, and with that act of wilful cynicism, a life of soaring vision and service was extinguished. Reduced to the rubble of the Indian justice system.Since Binayak was arrested, three courts have denied him bail, most damagingly, the Supreme Court on December 10, 2007 — International Human Rights Day: an ironic detail.

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Sometimes the true measure of people is revealed in the small, random remarks of those who know them. When the Supreme Court denied him bail, an old man told an activist at a rally for Binayak, “If the courts are not going to free our doctor, should we storm the jail?” Then he continued ruefully to himself, “But what’s the use? All the other prisoners would run away, but Dr Binayak would stay back.”

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With predictable myopia, the Indian State has been meeting grievance with violence, illness with extermination. Not cure. Draconian laws. CRPF battalions. IRP battalions. Increased militarisation. Thousands of crores for upgrading police. Special funds for Naxal-affected States. An invitation to competitive violence: that has been the government’s response to grassroots militancy. In Chhattisgarh, this manifested itself particularly harmfully in 2005 as the government-sponsored counter-revolution: the now infamous Salwa Judum, which pitted villager against villager and triggered a bloody civil war. 644 villages have been forcibly evacuated by the government, their residents forced into sub-human camps. Smoke out the support, is the State’s war cry. Civil rights activists tell you, the State’s real quarry is not even the Maoists, but the iron-rich soil, ready to be handed to private corporations, Nandigramstyle. There are rumours that the makeshift camps are now going to be turned into official revenue villages, which will force tribals to abdicate all the original evacuated land to the government. All of that is speculation still; but the excesses of the Salwa Judum are real.

It is against this backdrop that Binayak Sen caught the self-serving eye of the State.

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Binayak Sen, however, seems curiously aloof from all of this. As the police hustle him into the van, he presses his face against the iron bars and says urgently, “You must understand, there is a Malthusian process of exclusion going on in the country. You cannot create two categories of human beings. Everybody must wake up to this, otherwise soon it will be too late.” The concerns of the humanist are apparent even through the imprisoning bar. “If they arrest people like me, human rights workers will have no locus standi. I have never condoned Maoist violence. It is an invalid and unsustainable movement. Along with the Salwa Judum, it has created a dangerous split in the tribal community. But the grievances are real. There is an on-going famine in the region. The body mass is below 18.5. Forty percent of the country lives with malnutrition. In Scheduled Castes and Tribes, this goes up to 50 and 60 percent respectively. We have to strive for more inclusive growth. You cannot create two categories of people…”

I have no idea what the future holds for India. Maybe it will be able to pull out of this dream and start living in reality. Maybe the people will realise that it’s important to have a strong society both in the urban and rural communities. Maybe none of this will happen. Then India is bound to self destruct.

…..I’d like to think so. Here is the original speech. It’s about 13 minutes long.

and here is an edited musical version of the speech. How many celebrities can you identify?

When I came to Canada, this was my to do list :

Get a job
Buy a car
Buy a house
Buy a play station
Buy a motorcycle

I have been lucky enough to check off the first 4….number 5 still remains and by the looks of things, I will be able to check off the 5th point is during my mid-life crisis. I can only hope it will come soon.

If you ever want to buy me a gift, here is an accessory I REALLY, REALLY like.

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Welcome to my new site.

A few smart people must have noticed that I have now chosen WORDPRESS.COM as my blog tool. So far I have been really impressed with wordpress and hope that they will live up to my expectations (and hopefully take care of my formatting from here on).

Well, I have had a long hiatus from blogging and it is over now. Talk to you soon.