CFTRI: call for ‘accountability check’

 The Central Food Technology Research Institute (CFTRI)  takes up a sizeable  chunk of Mysore’s real estate.  Does the R & D done here and its benefits to  society add up to justify the size and scale of CFTRI’s Mysore establishment?
I find an answer in Dr Potty’s blog.  Where it says that CFTRI hasn’t come up with [...]

Ad.rage: When you want to smash the box

Ad.rage.  It hits TV viewers, usually during comercial break.
Symptom: You feel like lobbing your remote,  Iraqi journalist style,  at the TV set  in front.
A website on road rage has the logo that reads …When you just can’t take it anymore.  I feel ‘ragey’ about TV Commercials. The  ’breaks’  tend to get on your nerves as they get longer [...]

Calling IIT alumni

Every IIT could adopt a slum or cluster of villages, with development levels that are lower than the national average. The adopted area could then become a development laboratory.  And to implement socio-economic programmes  in the  development lab s   IITs could draw on the talents and financial support of their alumni.  This would be their  guru dakshina, [...]

Flying shoes at Bush news conference

It happened so suddenly that you couldn’t believe your own eyes. Television viewers the world over watched US  President George W Bush duck his head to dodge a throw of shoes from a TV reporter in Baghdad. It happened at a joint-news conference he addressed with Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during President Bush’s farewell [...]

Obamas: homeless in Washington

The White House,  I presume,  doesn’t take   sub-tenent,  even if he is the President-elect.  They have Blair House,  a guest residence in the WH neighbourhood.  But when Barack Obama sought permission to move in there  from Jan.5  his  request was  turned down by President Bush’s aides,  according to The New York Times.
Reason:  Blair House was booked till [...]

Rahul Gandhi on lal-batthi VIP

Rahul Gandhi has got it right ;  and  voiced it at the proper  place – Lok Sabha. He is cited as saying, public  outrage in the wake of  Mumbai26/11 was really about  prevelant perception  that the country had stopped valuing lives of the commoner ;  India only bothered about lal-batthi VIPs (the type that goes about in cars fitted with [...]

Mumbai 26/11: Bloggers chip in

In the begining there were bloggers. And there was a  flash-flood of posts on the Mumbai terror strike.  Many of them, bloggers, went beyond giving vent to their indignation; beyond fault-finding, finger-pointing, Paki-bashing, and came up with thoughts on steps we need to take not to get caught napping, again.
And then, someone came up with the idea [...]

Ex-ISI chief holds forth on CNN

Are these ISI guys a law unto themselves?  The thought crossed my mind as I watched a post-Mumbai interview on  CNN with former ISI chief Lt.Gen.Hamid Gul(1987-89).  He brushed aside, as ‘a frame-up’, the US charge that he had links with Taliban and al-Qaeda.
I don’t suppose any ISI official , serving or retired, would admit [...]

Avaaz – voicing India-Pak solidarity

I am still hoping — just once — for that mass demonstration (in Pakistan) of ordinary people against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake. – Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times.
 
A global civic advocacy group – avaaz.org – plans to send a message to [...]

Red-circled by the media

Ram Gopal Varma  was red-circled by the media on Monday. Today it was the turn of a woman police officer in Bangalore.  Page One images in Bangalore Mirror shows  Sub-inspector Shilpa chatting on her cell while on bandobast duty at the funeral of Maj. Sandeep Unnikrishnan who went down fighting terrorist in Mumbai’s Taj Hotel.
It [...]