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It is preposterous to see the long queues outside schools. These fine men and women are here for their kids admission into pre-primary sections. This school will demand lakhs of donation, and these parents will readily pay it! Some schools even demand minimum qualification of parents for admitting their wards. On what basis are they authorized to do so? If parent’s qualification affects a child’s education, then what are these schools here for? And bade bhaiyyas never stops them. Hope our dear HRD minister has this issue as an action item in his tasklist.

Every year, during this time, when the union budget is announced, there is a lot halla over it. Is the budget good? Will it help the common man? Will it be good for the industries, and the IT sector? Many economists believe that the best way to evaluate the budget is understanding behavior of the stock market.

I’ve always tried to write about my work in Sankalp and have failed numerous times. A recent lecture by my teacher gave me new directions and finally drove me into writing about resource management. I’ll write about three aspects of my life that fascinate me the most- Sankalp, Software Development and Poetry. A deep analysis of these made me realize that all these three are no different. They are one and the same.

In a recent lecture, my teacher rightly said- “The job of Information Technology is to eliminate the middle-man and if implemented in governance, we will have tremendous growth!” Let me elaborate. IT eliminates the middleman by supporting a process and hence automating it. May it be ATMs or eBay, or the Wikipedia- IT serves as a link between the user and the resources.

When Sachin Tendulkar travelled to Pakistan to face one of the finest bowling attacks ever assembled in cricket, Michael Schumacher was yet to race a F1 car, Lance Armstrong had never been to the Tour de France, Diego Maradona was still the captain of a world champion Argentina team, Pete Sampras had never won a Grand Slam.

I don’t know why, but we Indians are pretty bad at respecting the values of national significance- may it be our national sport or the national anthem, or the national animal. I always liked the Vodafone, Airtel or Idea ads for their innovative ideas, but the recent Aircel ad with Dhoni’s urge to save Indian tigers actually fascinated me! Firstly, because it is factual and secondly, because it is simple and straightforward.

I love dadu’s tales of the good old Calcutta of the ’50s. Today, Calcutta has hardly anything new to offer. Why did the city die? Even dadu resorts to silence on such questions. Today I see one more city going the Calcutta way- Mumbai. I read Rajiv Gandhi had once made a similar statement for Calcutta, but no one could save it. Maybe it was too late then. But now there is time for our leaders to save Mumbai.

There have been long debates on the problems with the Indian education system. Through some of my earlier posts I too have mentioned my opinion on the issue. All said and done, then why is the change not happening? Why doesn’t the student directly start questioning the teacher? Why is the ice not broken yet?

I’ll start with a renowned question you must be bored of- “Do you know, Hockey is the national sport of India?” The players of the same sport recently protested against the non-payment of their dues and the poor quality food they eat on tours and trainings, and their health insurance- something that every sport-person deserves. And there was a big halla over the “awakening of the sleeping minors”.

I am completely disgusted by the Sena-SRK drama going around. Here we have Shiv Sena, with their electoral fortunes and their relevance eroding heavily, they thereby taking a swing at anyone and everyone; SRK being their ideal target. Sena has targeted his latest film with typical made-for-media attacks on theatres screening the movie. SRK is making petty noises but still sticking to his guns. Eventually both sides benefit.

I had some questions in my head which disturbed me for quite sometime.

It is predicted that India and China will emerge out as the world superpowers in the next decade. Obama casually warned his men against Indians. It was an immense pleasure to read the recent cover story of India Today- ‘Changing face of rural India’.