View from my Hotel Room - Vung Tau, Vietnam

Guilty of editing the picture in my mobile. Still the view was awesome. This was a few months back, just felt like posting it.

Section 66 A of Information Technology Act

Indian Constitutional Reference:

Article 19 of the Indian Constitution protects certain rights including freedom of speech and expression with reasonable restrictions.

According to Article 358 of the Indian Constitution, when a proclamation of national emergency is made the six fundamental rights under article 19 are automatically suspended.

But the 44 th Amendment Act of 1958 restricted the scope of Article 358 by restricting its applicability only when emergency is proclaimed on the ground of war or external aggression.

Section 66 A of IT Act states that any person who sends by means of a computer resource or communication device any information that was grossly offensive or has a menacing character could be punished with imprisonment for a maximum term of three years, besides imposition of appropriate fine.

Argument:

Can we really say that Section 66 A can be termed as a reasonable restriction for Article 19? or are we in the state of emergency proclaimed on the ground of war or external aggression?

Firstly, usage of subjective terms like "grossly offensive" and "menacing character" to define such an important article makes it very susceptible for misuse by our administration, politicians, wealthy and police. Also, things which are offensive to a person may be acceptable to other, which makes this further debatable.

Furthurmore, the constitutional validity of the article is being widely discussed and is still pending with the Supreme Court. Government tried to support the act with various explanations like "saying misuse of law isn't strong enough reason to scrap or amend it" or "an advisory has been issued to the Chief Secretaries and DGP's of all States and UTs.The advisory asks State governments not to allow the police to make arrests under Section 66A of the IT Act without prior approval from an officer not below the rank of Inspector General of Police in the metropolitan cities or Deputy Commissioner of Police or Superintendent of Police at the district level". Also the Government tried to justify the legality of the act by comparing it with Section 127 of the UK communication act.

 

Comparing the act with another act in UK doesnt really justify the act itself. Moreover, when the said act in UK was widely criticized by the House of Lords. Our Constitution was framed by taking references from various other constitutions in the world. As outlined by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in this context, "The only new things if there can be any, in a constitution framed so late in the day are the variations made to remove the faults and to accommodate it to the needs of the country." (Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol VII p (35-38)). In such a case, making an act in lines with an act in UK which was widely criticized by its own House of Lords is clearly a risk to the idea of the formation Indian Constitution itself.

This law is similar to the laws made by the Imperial British Government in India in the Pre-Independence era to curb the nationalist movement. Would the National Leaders, framers of our Constitution or we ourselves would have accepted a similar law if it was passed by the Colonial Government in India before 1947? Six decades after Independence are we going back to those days? During the colonial rule news papers, pamphlets, journals, public meetings are the main routes for the speech and expression, propagation of nationalism by the nationalists. In this era, social media is an additional route which is more powerful than any of the above means. Restricting it through Section 66 A also makes it almost impossible for people to criticize politicians or expose corruption. This is surely against our values of liberty and democracy.

In a way this can even restrict the freedom of press. Are we trying to go to such a state after all these days and struggles? If we continue in these lines we will slowly retreat to our earlier days of colonial policies but by our own people.

Another perspective:

Some argue "Indian National movement is the only movement where the broadly Gramscian theoretical perspective of a war of position was successfully practiced; where state power was not seized through one movement of revolution, but through prolonged popular struggle on political, moral and ideological level; where counter hegemony was built up over the years."
But the social media with full freedom, can try to bring the radical social change in a modern liberal democracy, as described by Gramsci which involved more than anything developing a strong and dynamic culture people capable of establishing the necessary institutions for a subversion of hegemony. For such a state social media can be a means, is this what our Government is trying to avoid?

As a democracy, if these dynamic changes are what the people want then then Government shouldn't try to undermine them, people should be given the choice.

Relief:

Atleast we can take respite from the stand taken by the Supreme Court in the dismissal of a PIL by Advocate M. L. Sharma seeking intervention by the court in directing the Election Commission to curb hate speeches (debatable decision), instills the confidence that we haven't lost this war for our freedom of speech and expression yet.


Disclaimer: This post doesn't criticize anyone, it is just an opinion and facts drawn from various sources.

Took an IQ test yesterday

Free-IQTest.net - IQ Test

SMILEY MOON

Top left is Venus, Top right is Jupiter, Bottom center is moon

Today we(me, kishu, phani) were going to atm(taramani guest house) on our way i saw this wonderful and astounding scene..Later after coming to room a friend(phani) sent me a link about this. Which says ""In the last week in November and the first week of December 2008, the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, will be close together in the evening sky, forming a spectacular double. The two are closest together on Monday December 1st. On the same night the Crescent Moon will appear just beneath them, forming a “Smiley Face”

Mumbai

The inhumane killing spree went on in Mumbai struck everyone by shock and terror. 40 terrorists, divided into batches of 5, attacked(raided) Mumbai(India) in an most unexpected fashion, killing people and taking hostages. Then police and Indian military took control and launched counter attacks. The pictures of gunmen killing people, bloodshed, army wandering the streets etc..makes us wonder what the fuck is this? Is this war?yes, it is war and only the other side is attacking and we are just counter attacking those.
We all know that people who attacked are only dummies, we also know where the roots to this war are and who is nurturing these forces. "To kill a tree we have to uproot it." Cutting the branches won't help. Isn't it the same reason quoted by US and the allies to attack Afghan and Iraq? I know unlike those nations we don't believe in vengeance. We trust in peace and non-violence, after all that is what we preached and that is how we earned our independence. But this shouldn't come out as inability and cowardliness. If we are silent even after this atrocious attack we risk our fame in the world. This attack (holding foreign nationals as hostages) is to show the world that we lack security. This attack damages not only our tourism and sports industries but also many other industries are at stake. We must show the world that we are not going to be bullied any further. Lets warn "Stop nurturing those organizations otherwise we will make you." Our intelligence even have proofs that the arms for this attack are supplied by them. The prestige of India is at stake now.

Top ten science experiments

While browsing, I came across this article. I am posting it here. For more details refer to the book "The top ten most beautiful experiments" by George Johnson.

1. Galileo Galilei

Period:- (1564 to 1642)

Legend has it that in order to test how gravity worked, Galileo dropped two balls, a heavy one and a light one, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, showing that they landed at the same time. Historians doubt this - because his actual experiment was much better.

The Italian carved a groove down the centre of a board about 20 feet long and 10 inches wide. Then he propped it at an angle and timed how quickly the balls rolled down the track. What he discovered was that the distance the ball travels is proportional to the square of the time that has elapsed.

But how, in an age before clocks, could Galileo measure this so precisely? He probably used music. Along the ball's path, he placed cat-gut frets, like those on a lute. As the rolling ball clicked against the frets, Galileo sang a tune, using the upbeats to time the motion and discover a new law.

2. William Harvey

Period:-(1578 to 1657)

Galen had taught that the body contains two separate vascular systems: a blue "vegetative" fluid, the elixir of nourishment and growth, coursed through the veins, while a bright red "vital" fluid travelled through the arteries, activating the muscles and stimulating motion. Invisible spirits, or "pneuma", caused the fluids to slosh back and forth like the tides. The heart just went along for the ride, expanding and contracting like a bellows.

Harvey was dubious. Cutting open a snake, he used a forceps to pinch the main vein, or vena cava, just before it entered the heart. The space downstream from the obstruction emptied of blood, while the heart grew paler and smaller, as though it were about to die. When Harvey released the grip, the heart refilled and sprung back to life.

Pinching the heart's main artery had the opposite effect: the space between heart and forceps became gorged with blood, inflating like a balloon. It was the heart, not invisible spirits, that was the driving motor, pushing red blood to the extremities of the body, where it passed into the bluish veins and returned to the heart for rejuvenation. There was one kind of blood and it moved in a circle: it circulated.

3. Isaac Newton

Period:-(1642 to 1727)

In Newton's day, Europe's great scientists believed that white light was pure and fundamental. When it bounced off a coloured object or passed through a tinted liquid or glass, it became stained somehow with colour - whatever "colour" was.

Newton, holed up in a dark room at his family farm in Woolsthorpe, turned the idea on its head. He cut a hole in his window shutter and held a prism in the path of the sun, spreading the light into an oblong spectrum. Then he funnelled the spectrum through a second prism. White again.

Finally, he allowed the colours to pass, one by one, through the second prism. Starting at the red end and progressing toward the blue, each colour was bent a little more by the glass. Light, Newton had discovered, "consists of rayes differently refrangible". It was white that was the mongrel - not just another colour, but a combination of them all, a "heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rayes".

4. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier

Period:-(1743 to 1794)

In the 18th century, the conventional wisdom was that things burned because they contained something called phlogiston. Set a piece of wood on fire and it exuded this mysterious essence, leaving behind a pile of ash. Wood, it logically followed, was composed of phlogiston and ash.

Likewise, heating a metal under an intense flame left a whitish brittle substance, or calx. Metal was thus composed of phlogiston and calx. But Lavoisier was troubled by one thing: with the phlogiston expelled, the calx was heavier than the original metal. How could phlogiston weigh less than zero?

By cooking mercury in a flask, he showed that, as the calx formed, something was sucked from the surrounding air. He isolated the gas and lit a taper, noting that it burned "with a dazzling splendour". Calx was not metal without phlogiston, but metal combined with what Lavoisier would name oxygen.

Left behind in the flask was a gas that extinguished flames - what we now call nitrogen. Fire and rust produced similar reactions. Lavoisier had discovered the nature of oxidation - and the chemical composition of the air.

5. Luigi Galvani

Period:-(1737 to 1798)

One day in Bologna, Galvani was startled to see a dismembered frog's leg twitch when an assistant cranked a static electricity generator on the far side of the laboratory. The same effect occurred during lightning storms. Even more remarkably, Galvani found, the frog's leg would move, seemingly of its own accord, as it hung from a hook, even in the clearest weather.

He concluded that some kind of animal electricity was involved. His compatriot Alessandro Volta was just as sure that the electricity was non-biological, produced by the touching of two different metals: the frog's leg had hung on a brass hook from an iron rail.

Though neither man could quite see it, they were dancing around a single truth. Volta confirmed that electricity can indeed come from two metals - he had invented the battery. But Galvani went on to show that there is also electricity in the body.

Taking a dissected frog, he nudged a severed nerve against another using a probe made of glass. No metal was involved, but when nerve touched nerve, the muscle contracted, as surely as if someone had closed a switch.

6. Michael Faraday

Period:-(1791 to 1867)

In his youth, Faraday had performed a suite of experiments showing the linkage between electricity and magnetism, inventing, along the way, the electric motor and the dynamo. But by the time he was 53, he had fallen into a deep depression.

Maybe it was a barrage of flirtatious correspondence from Lady Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Byron, that snapped him out of his funk: whatever the cause, he decided to push the unification a step further, and show that electricity and magnetism are related to light.

Using an Argand oil lamp, Faraday projected polarised light through a block of glass, alongside of which sat a powerful electromagnet. Holding a polarising filter, called a Nicol prism, to his eye, he rotated it until the light was extinguished. Then he switched on the current.

The image of the flame suddenly reappeared. He turned the magnet off and the flame disappeared. The magnetic field, he realised, was twisting the light beam - and if the polarity of the field was reversed, the light beam rotated the other way. Faraday had unified two more forces, demonstrating that light was actually a form of electromagnetism.

7. James Joule

Period:-(1818 to 1889)

Lavoisier had done away with phlogiston, but before his death he had introduced the idea of caloric, his name for an invisible substance - a "subtle fluid" - said to be the carrier of heat.

Put a metal poker in a fire, he argued, and the caloric will rise up the shaft until you can feel the warmth in the handle. According to this theory, the reason something gets hot when you rub it is because you abrade the surface and let some caloric out.

But why, no matter how long you rubbed, did the heat keep coming? Either there was an infinite supply of caloric in every object or, as Joule suspected, heat was something else altogether. With a rigging of pulleys and weights, he spun a paddle wheel inside a vessel of water and carefully measured the change in temperature.

The motion of the paddle made the water warmer, and the relationship was precise: raising one pound of the liquid by one degree took 772 foot-pounds of work. Joule had discovered that heat was not a thing. It was a form of motion.

8. A A Michelson

Period:-(1852 to 1931)

For a Navy man such as Michelson, it was unthinkable that the Earth could be adrift in the infinitude with no landmarks to measure by. So he set out to prove the existence of the aether, the fixed backdrop of the universe and the substance in which our planet swam as it moved through space. In his apparatus, two beams of light travelled in perpendicular directions.

The beam moving upstream - with the earth's orbit - should, he predicted, be slowed by the wind of the aether, while the other beam should be less effected. By comparing their velocities with an interferometer, Michelson would calculate the motion of the Earth against the heavens.

But something was wrong: the speed of the two beams was the same. With help from Edward Morley, Michelson made the measurements much more precisely. Still there was not a hint of aether. In fact, the experiment was a beautiful failure.

As Einstein went on to show, there can be no fixed space or even fixed time. As we move through the universe, our measuring sticks shrink and stretch, our clocks run slower and faster - all to preserve the one true standard, which is not the aether, but the speed of light.

9. Ivan Pavlov

Period:-(1849 to 1936)

Contrary to legend, Pavlov hardly ever used bells in his experiments with salivating dogs. His animals were more discriminating. In his "Tower of Silence", sealed from distractions, he and his assistants conditioned the animals to distinguish between objects rotating clockwise or counter-clockwise, between a circle and an ellipse, even between subtle shades of gray.

But for his most remarkable experiment, he used music. First, a dog was trained to salivate when it heard an ascending scale, but not a descending one. But what, Pavlov wondered, would happen if the animal listened to the other combinations of the same notes? The melodies were played and the spittle collected.

Through simple conditioning, the dog had categorised the music it heard into two groups, depending on whether the pitches were predominantly rising or falling. The mind had lost a bit of its mystery, Pavlov had shown how learning was a matter of creatures forming new connections in a living machine.

10. Robert Millikan

Period:-(1868 to 1953)

By bending a cathode ray with an electrical field, Cambridge scholar J?J Thomson had shown electricity to be a form of matter, and measured the ratio of its charge to its mass. It followed that electricity was made of particles, but to clinch the case someone needed to isolate and measure one.

In Millikan's laboratory in Chicago, two round brass plates, the top one with a hole drilled through the centre, were mounted on a stand and illuminated from the side by a bright light. Then the plates were connected to a 1,000-volt battery. With a perfume atomiser, Millikan sprayed a mist of oil above the apparatus and watched through a telescope as some of the droplets - they looked like little stars - fell into the area between the plates.

As he tweaked the voltage, he watched as some drops were pushed slowly upward while others were pulled down. Their passage through the atomiser had ionised them, giving the drops negative or positive charges.

By timing their movement with a stopwatch, Millikan showed that charge, like pocket change, came in discrete quantities. He had found the electron.

My Passion

I don t know whether the title of this post is apt or not, may be I should say " The Dream 'Unpursued' "

I always postponed writing this post blaming it on time. Today, I felt, "There is never a wrong time"..........


In my life I had different ambitions at different points of time, till my 8 th grade I wanted to be a scientist or an architect, then in 9 th a doctor, in 10 th an engineer. At present doing B.Tech in Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering at IITMadras, I believe I am pursuing my "architect" and "engineer" dream.

There is a little(a very little) chance at present to pursue my cherished "scientist" dream of inventing or discovering something.

A few days back I saw a notice about a lecture by "Dr. MS Swaminathan", a celebrated agricultural scientist and the father of Green Revolution in India.Seeing his name I recollected my school days when our biology teacher lectured about his contributions to the field of Agriculture.He was one of my inspirations from then. I rejoiced when I heard that he is coming here for a lecture. Later that night when we were discussing some thing some of my friends asked who "MS Swaminathan" is. This question stunned me. Then I felt pity. I don't know whom I pitied, Is it my friends, who asked me the question, for being so ignorant?(No, I don't think so. Cause many asked this question. I don't think it is their mistake not hearing the name of an eminent scientist). May be I pitied MS Swaminathan himself for not being known to some of the bright minds of the country. May be I pitied myself knowing that one of my role model is a person who is not so famous even after being called as the "Father of Green Revolution in India" and also as one of the most influential Asians of the century. Anyways I will talk about this in more detail later if possible.

Coming back to my dreams I always had this dream of becoming a lawyer, which I never revealed to anyone. I never even tried to pursue it. For me it is a profession in which one can actually stand up to his own ideals and even express his awe in front of anyone.
Where you can be the twilight in the desert, a ray of hope in the darkness. I always had a feeling that this is one of the noblest professions. May be one of the few professions where you get the chance to change the system. Where your voice will be heard. Where people value your opinion.

Recently, I had a feeling that may be I should have studied law. This feeling may be from watching some characters like Gregory Peck as Atticus finch in "To kill a mocking bird",Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison in "JFK", Joe Pesci in "My cousin Vinny", Richard Gere in "Primal Fear", Tom Cruise in "A few Good Men" etc. Not to mention many characters especially James Spader and Willian Shatner in "Boston Legal". May be it is just a feeling from those scenes and dialogues.
Here I mention one of those hundreds

Primal Fear:

I am your attorney which means I am your mother, your father, your teacher and your priest by Richard Gerry to Edward Norton