Wednesday, August 09, 2006
RTI Amended, India Blinded
The Union Cabinet has decided to amend the Right to Information Act, 2005 to exclude file notings, Cabinet papers and examination answer sheets from the Act's purview. This would leave the Act toothless. An act which in Arvind Kejriwal's words is taking India "from being a representative democracy to a participatory democracy." The Act has already seen many success stories and has become a nightmare for the inefficient and slimy bureaucrats and politicians. The Act has empowered the citizens with the right to know of how the decisions in their name are being taken and how pubic money is being spent. It has the potential to stem corruption.
Perhaps, afraid of its widespread implications on their nefarious activities the bureaucracy and the legislature have hatched a plot to blur the transparency which the Act had provided to our red-taped archaic administrative machinery. It's now a fight between the rights of a citizen and the whims and fancies of the administrative functionaries. We shouldn't let the amendment to the Act to be tabled in the Parliament. Though activists believe that the widespread protests will prevent that from happening, but Sandeep Pandey says amidst the confidence, "You never know how shameless they can get."
The internet is synonymous with free flow of information, and it's time we take this protest online, via the modern-day voice of the net-savvy citizen - the blog. Let us not let them shame our democracy.
Put this up on your blog/website or wherever you feel like (Original image courtesy Sakshi Trust) 
Links:
* About the Right to Information Act
* Background and Perspective
* The RTI Act, 2005 [.doc 379 KB]
* Aruna Roy on the proposed amendment
Monday, August 07, 2006
Season Two - Vintage Indian Advertisements
On June 24 ended the inaugural season of Vintage Indian Advertisements on Cutting the Chai, featuring 61 print ads in a dozen instalments. Today begins Season Two. The last season was sourced from Indrajal Comics, the ads in this one adorned the pages of Reader's Digest, scrounged from Shillong's popular second-hand bookseller Barua & Sons at Thana Road, trunks and cartons in my Shillong home and Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday market. This season is expected to last longer. Will try to post a few ads daily; or at worst every other day.
[Click on images for a bigger view]
Fiat - The Premier Automobiles Ltd.
Lux (Nanda - Star of Teen Devian)
Tata Textiles
Johnson's Baby Powder
Gold Coin - Real Apple Juice (Dyer Meakin Breweries Ltd)
Ads from November 1965
PS: Dwaipayan was a great help during the Shillong leg of the collection effort.
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The mystery of the missing B
Ever wondered where is the B drive on your Windows PC? I had once thought about it, but didn't go hunting to know where. Now Anthony digs out the answer:
The answer goes back to the glory days of floppy discs and DOS. The early DOS operating system designated two drives, A and B, strictly for floppy drives. Why? Because many early computers didn't have native hard drives - they booted from Drive A, and ran applications from Drive B.
Later, as computers came with hard drives, the second floppy drive became a useless appendage - the computer equivalent of an appendix. To avoid confusion during the evolutionary window when computers with new hard drives coexisted beside computers with two floppies, the hard drives were given the "C" slot.
Technically speaking, the "computer" isn't missing the B drive, it's just that later Microsoft operating systems have omitted it as unnecessary. You can read more about the ins and outs of archaic drive systems at Microsoft Support.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
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