Why I blog??

Blogging is a new experience for me and I am grateful for it. And no, I don’t blog because I am a failed writer, a lonely person, hate editors, need to get it all out or because I want to make money. So why do I blog?
Captive audience:
I blog because I get satisfaction from knowing that a certain number of people read what I write . The individual post statistics help. Whether it’s through search engines, blog aggregators, or by clicking on ‘tags’ people who arrive come looking for something. On the other hand when I write an article for a newspaper, I am never sure of anything. Who reads and why.
Blogging is successful because it gives people the opportunity to read whenever they have the time. Why, you can read a post even a week later…archives are easy to access. No messy clippings required.
It gives me a high
I blog because I get a thrill from reading a meaningful comment. Quantity is not the thing here. Even if it is just one comment, if it adds to my article, makes me see things from a different perspective I feel I have grown as a person. This was one thing I never got on the job. This could be because people don’t immediately sign in to their email accounts after reading a newspaper article they feel something about.
Oh, to be free!
I also blog because there is freedom. No, not exactly freedom from editors. I understand that editors have other aspects to consider – like commercial success of a newspaper or magazine, the advertiser’s interest and in some cases the fear of the owner of the newspaper or some heavy weight politician. If I were an editor I might compromise…so no judgments here.
But at times an editor might truly have an opposite view from you. Ideas are subjective. I have often had to sell my ideas before selling my article. And I am proud of the fact that even when I had a regular job, the ideas have been mine 95 per cent of the time. With my blog I don’t have to sell my ideas to anyone. I write because I believe in it.
I want to make a difference
I have one clear objective. I want to make a difference in people’s lives and I feel that blogging could help me there. I know it seems too huge an ambition, and perhaps naive, but quantity is not everything. Even if an article of mine helps one individual in a small way I feel happy. And blogging gives me the ability to find out. :D
Lastly, I blog because I can write on a variety of subjects. I know there are blogging ‘rules’ which say one should not…but if I followed them, I would not be me. I have a wide variety of interests and yes, even several passions. Plus I feel very strongly about most things. If I force myself to write just about a few subjects I will not be being true to myself. And I don’t think I have the capability right now to work on five other blogs.
So readers, bear with me if a particular subject doesn’t interest you. I will try to make you feel with me. Either pro or against. At times you might shrug and go away…that’s fine too. There is always tomorrow...

poem !

What’s life like for a royal child?
Servants attending, all wishes come true!
The child comes to this world with a silver spoon,
Life is beautiful with complaints hardly few!

Go down the ladder to a normal lad,
The child leads an existence, ordinary yet joyful!
The extravagance is spared for all we know,
And the unfulfilled wishes may be plentiful.

But ever imagined life of a poor little child?
Living with the most minimum of resources.
There are hardly any wishes that might come true!
Lonely and alone, he fights life’s cruel and wretched forces!

The child himself earns the meagre meal he eats,
Sweating out every ounce of his ability!
Yet the child is discarded and shown the door,
And labelled openly a cheap liability!

What may I ask is the fault of that unlucky child?
Who works to survive each and every day!
Abused, exploited and cheaply treated,
when children like us live life the easy way!

What would the child grow up to be?
A misfit in society fighting social regressions!
What values would he be able to give his kids?
While hiding in the past of his own reflections!

So is it fair, the ordeal the child is inevitably putting himself through?
Is it fair that he’s made to face situations?
The treatment given is clearly unjustified,
The child clearly needs awareness and affection!

Does this child really have to suffer this way?
In the state of this disgraceful strife ?
We can help that child and we have to,
The child deserves another chance, to affection, to education, to a far better life!

Importance Of Accounting Profession in the society

The accounting professionals are getting more opportunities to explore the profession now-a-days. If we dig into the causes of the increasing demand for accounting professionals, the significant reason is the crucial & critical role they play in financial decision making, either directly or indirectly.

No business can survive without proper maintenance of records & books of accounts of all the transactions in the entity either material or immaterial. Hence, maintaining the above books is necessary for the business to flourish. Generally, the design & maintenance of such books is done by management. The supervision & guidance of the same is done by the accounting professionals.

 The scope of the professionals is not only limited to the financial information, they also take active part in financial management, strategic management, building strong internal controls etc. The most important field of accounting professional is taxation i.e   giving tax saving plans, advising about the most suitable investment scheme in compliance with the provisions of law and simultaneously saving money and so on.

 An accounting professional just doesn’t confine to book keeping of his clients or employment, the professional can also go to the court of law and can represent his aggrieved client in front of the honorable court on matters regarding taxation of all kinds, matters relating to company law, labor law, industrial law and so on, on par with an advocate who has a law degree.

 There are 3 types of professionals in accounting profession:-

1. Chartered accountant (CA)

2. Company secretary (CS)

3. Cost and works accountant (CWA)

 So, CA, CS, CWA are multi-dimensional professions to have fun, thrill, money & status simultaneously.

When My Friend Found a Love Bug :p

It was in my summer break when I found a chain email in my inbox. I wanted to delete it without reading it, just like the rest, but I am glad that I did not. This experience was different and hence I wanted to share it with you all.

This mail neither prophesied bad luck to people who don’t forward it and nor did it have any motivational content. In fact, it was addressed by some lady (whose name I don’t want to reveal) requesting that the mail be reached to her friend, whom she misses the most.

I didn’t know the actual reason myself but the message she had written as to why she couldn’t speak to her friend touched my heart to the deepest.

This email shared her experience in life about what she did after her high school (I guess that’s when the girls parted) and how she managed to find a job, but couldn’t find happiness. The reason she gave was because she stole her best friend’s boyfriend. Yes, another love crap mail!

She says that it was never her intention to hurt her friend’s feelings but she found her true soul mate and couldn’t let go of him. She is living happily with him, now her husband, and her children but peace be found only if her friend forgives her.

This brought back a vague memory of a dear friend of mine from school. I once had a major fight with her for silly reason. Our friendship broke immediately and we lost contact after I left school. I forgot all about her, may be because it happened a long time ago.

I took my old school scrap book and punched in her number into myphone. I was redirected to her new contact details by BSNL operators. I spoke to her for one hour or so. I felt good after speaking to her. We planned to go shopping and the good old days were back in my life again.

I felt funny for this girl to remember that moment while I don’t even remember the boy’s name. Of course there is no evidence as to such that this “email girl” was the same one from my school.

The lady in her email enclosed her family photo so that her friend can find her at the earliest. Curious as my nature was, I opened the linked picture without thinking. I felt bad that I was getting too involved in other’s private life. That’s when I realised my mistake.

~~Half an hour later~~

“Love can solve any problem “I said gingerly trying to cool my brother.

We were sitting in my room busy formatting the system which was now infected with virus “It was not even in spam folder. I think Google thinks some love letters-“

“All love letters should be spammed. It’s easy for intruders to trap people like you”, my brother scolded, “It’s high time you realise that Love is the problem”

I took the software installation CDs and gave him “Yes, But I was able to meet a lost friend”

”You don’t have to crush your system to meet a friend”, he grumbled angrily.

“Crush?” I smirked.

“Quit bugging me”, he yelled as I ran out of the room.

Magnetic levitation: Floating cars are possible..!!

A research group from school of physics and astronomy, Tel-Aviv University proved that floating cars and skates are possible with the “Quantum levitation”. This effect can be achieved by super cooling a material called ‘yttrium barium copper oxide’ with liquid nitrogen, which turns it into a superconductor.

                 In superconducting state the material will be strongly diamagnetic. When an external magnetic field is applied it will create an opposing magnetic field, locking it in place. This is called Quantum locking. When the super cooled material is kept on the magnetic tracks, it will float without any support.

 This levitation effect can be explained by “Meissner effect”, which is the expulsion of magnetic field from a super conductor during its transition to the super conductor state.

 
here's another video showing a floating hover board ..!

VIA :  we r replicants

Heaven live

India’s Corruption Wars….!

       Nowadays, I find my mind turning to memories of a granduncle. He was over six feet tall, had a booming voice and by the time I was twenty was already in his 70’s and retired from the Raj’s government as a head constable of police. He went for his evening walk carrying a lathi-like stick and had an imposing presence; I could imagine him quelling prospective independence ‘agitators’ with just a look in their direction. Of an afternoon he would turn into a cafe a common adda for us, seat himself on bench, take a sip of  tea, lean back on his chair and declare, “This country is so corrupt! It is going to the dogs!” This was usually followed by a passionate recounting of the latest misdemeanour in the municipal corporation of India, that little vast town country in Asia where I grew up. My mother, who no doubt had heard this diatribe before, would continue knitting scarcely offering a comment. 

        You can see why my mind, nowadays, wanders to thoughts of my early childhood and of my retired granduncle. Judges, ministers, members of parliament, civil servants, businessmen, NGOs, investigative agencies, sports bodies, media personalities, all hurl accusations of corruption at each other. Everyone seems to be saying what my grand uncle used to tell us fifty years ago: “This country is so corrupt; it is going to the dogs!” 

        Maybe it is time we turn to Mark Granovetter, the Stanford University sociologist, who in his book, The Social Construction of Corruption, points out that cries of corruption often hide power struggles and that groups with conflicting interests will present standards that label their own  behaviour as appropriate and label behaviour that benefits competing groups as illegitimate or ‘corrupt’.

         One such social group that is in the thick of today’s corruption wars and  labelling exercises is one  that  Leela Fernandez of the University of Minnesota calls the New Middle Class. This group, she says, in her book, India’s New Middle Class, Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform is not merely  defined by   income  or occupation or even caste. It  descends from the groups in India that embraced English-language education  and found employment in the colonial state in the modern professions such as  medicine, law,  the military and the civil service and has dominated Indian public life because of the cultural capital it possesses. This  cultural capital is then maintained  by their privileged access to the few good quality English medium schools that exist in India today and as a consequence to  those few high quality higher education institutions that act as gatekeepers to jobs in the higher civil service,  in public and private sector management, and professional jobs in the media, financial services,  law, medicine and teaching. 

        This cosy arrangement is being threatened, starting from the mid-1960’s, as democracy in India deepens.  

        The Congress party, from its founding in 1885 till well into the Independence era, maintained its power by enlisting a combination of the English-educated middle class and well-to-do landowners. The English-educated middle class through their cultural capital maintained a monopoly of the civic discourse and controlled the definition of the public interest and the land-owners brought with them the control of the patron networks they commanded in rural India as described by Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph in their 1967 book, The Modernity of Tradition.

       Lucia Michelutti describes how poverty, illiteracy, a disregard for law and order and political violence co-exists with a commitment to the idea of democracy among the poor in North India.  Democracy has been vernacularized!

        The New Middle Class has retaliated by waging a subtle war to label elected representatives and politicians as corrupt. The battle ground for this war is the English-language print and TV media which reaches a miniscule 25 million people in India while the vast Indian language print media with 170 million readers and the Indian language television with 300 million viewers remain largely unconcerned. However this tiny English-language media audience supports, nearly Rs 10,000 crores , or 50% of all advertising revenue. Winning the hearts and minds of this audience is crucial for media owners.

         NGOs,  the praetorian guard of the New Middle Class, is at the forefront of such labeling exercises. The current NGO demand for a Lok Pal,   uses the corruption platform, but its real goal is to give the New Middle Class leverage over elected representatives of the people. In an earlier move, NGOs pressurized the Election Commission to require candidates for electoral office to file affidavits listing ‘criminal charges’ against them. Most  ‘charges’ are for things like  ‘unlawful assembly’ but this move has not only  created an incentive in the rough and tumble Indian electoral scene for political rivals to trump up ‘charges’ against each other but also   label politicians as criminal and corrupt. This is unfair because  a person is innocent unless proven guilty. Affidavits ought to be necessary only if charges against a candidate have been proven in court.

        Much of the discourse about corruption in modern India is framed by the work of the Santhanam Commission of the early 1960s and two key institutions that we have today for preventing and investigating corruption, the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) were created based on this Commission’s recommendation.

        ‘Corruption can exist only if there is someone willing to corrupt and capable of corrupting,’ said Santhanam. ‘We regret to say that both this willingness and capacity to corrupt is found in large measure in the industrial and commercial classes.’

        For Santhanam, the villains were the ‘industrial and commercial classes’ from who the newly created public enterprises had to be protected.

        This is the reason why it proposed a Central Vigilance Commission supervising an army of Vigilance Officers posted in all public and quasi-public undertakings.  The Santhanam Commission constructed corruption as essentially arising from the depredations of the ‘industrial and commercial classes’. The modus operandi of these classes, it felt, was one of subverting the working of the newly created State enterprises. Viewing the same issues in today’s light we are more likely to attribute this form of corruption as arising from the License Raj and excessive domination of the economy by the State. We may merely propose that the License Raj be abolished.

        The Committee added two more elements to its construction of corruption that haunt us to this day.

        The first element was how the term ‘public servant’ was defined. The Indian definition is very different from the definition in advanced industrial economies. In those economies, ‘public servants’ are only those civil servants who are directly employed by the State. In India it was defined very widely and includes ‘any person required performing a public duty’ and ‘public duty’ is defined equally broadly: Essentially any duty that ‘the public at large has an interest in.’ 

This includes obvious government functionaries like ministers of the central and state governments and bureaucrats and sarpanches in villages. It also includes judges in courts, employees of nationalized banks and insurance companies, officers of railways and state transport corporations, teachers in schools and colleges that accept any modicum of government financial support. 

        This wide definition today includes possibly 30 million people, making the task of vigilance and anti-corruption immense.

        The second element was that it has constructed corruption as a criminal offence instead of a combination of criminal and civil offences. Criminal offences are much more difficult to prove in court because the standards of proof for them are much higher. For example, to secure a criminal conviction for corruption, investigators have to actually trap public servants in the act of receiving money. 

        On top of this, Indian courts, consistent with our view of a democratic polity, have prescribed elaborate safeguards for ‘trapping’ public servants in the act of receiving bribes. The end result, because of these and related reasons, is that corruption charges take years, if ever, to be proven. And even if criminal charges are proven, there is no easy way to make a corrupt public servant give up the fruits of his ill-gotten gain because present Indian law makes it difficult to attach property that is bought with proceeds of a corrupt act and held in the names of close relatives, (so-called ‘benami’ transactions). 

              India is at 87, roughly in the middle, behind our sibling rival, China, at 78. Mexico is at 98, behind us and so is Argentina at 105. The higher echelons of the list are usually occupied by small European countries like Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Netherlands and by small island nations like Hong Kong and Singapore. Germany, at 15 leads the larger nations ahead of UK at 20 and the United States at 22.

        Egypt, where the ruling Mubarak clan has been recently driven out of office amidst allegations of massive corruption is at about the same level as India.

Switzerland, a country that is usually implicated in most corruption scandals is at a lofty 8th rank, raising the first eyebrow about what exactly is being measured by this index.

         As democracy deepens, dramatic power shifts will continue to happen in Indian society and the Middle Class needs to accept that all such power shifts may not be in their favor. The Indian Middle Class sowed the wind of democracy and is now reaping its whirlwind.

       I strolled down one morning to the stretch of Parks where tombstones of the town’s grandees stand cheek by jowl. I stood for a moment before my granduncle’s, and wondered how he would have responded if I had told him that his distress at corruption nearly fifty years ago was merely the sense of loss of a Raj’s police head-constable regretting the passing of an era.

Lets fight against it ! You are not going to gain but you'll loose your self-respect !

Its a crime taking bribe and its more worst giving it !!

Nucleus metropolis...!

           Nuclear weapons tests are experiments carried out to determine the effectiveness, yield and explosive capability of nuclear weapons. Throughout the twentieth century, most nations that have developed nuclear weapons have tested them. Testing nuclear weapons can yield information about how the weapons work, as well as how the weapons behave under various conditions and how structures behave when subjected to nuclear explosions. Additionally, nuclear testing has often been used as an indicator of scientific and military strength, and many tests have been overtly political in their intention; most nuclear weapons states publicly declared their nuclear status by means of a nuclear test.

           The first nuclear weapon was detonated as a test by the United States at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945, with a yield approximately equivalent to 20kilotons. The first hydrogen bomb, codenamed "Mike", was tested at the Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands on November 1 (local date) in 1952, also by the United States. The largest nuclear weapon ever tested was the "Tsar Bomba" of the Soviet Union at Novaya Zemlya on October 30, 1961, with an estimated yield of around 50 megatons.

Facts :

          By afternoon the wind had fallen silent over Pokhran. At 3:45 p.m., the timer detonated the three devices. Around 200 to 300 m deep in the earth, the heat generated was equivalent to a million degrees centigrade--as hot as temperatures on the sun. Instantly, rocks weighing around a thousand tonnes, a mini mountain underground, vapourised...shockwaves from the blasts began to lift a mound of earth the size of a football field by several metres. One scientist on seeing it said, "I can now believe stories of Lord Krishna lifting a hill." --India Today

           On 28 May 1998 Pakistan detonated five undergound nuclear tests. These followed five nuclear tests by India two weeks earlier. In response to the tests, novelist Arundhati Roy wrote that "This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon."

           But these tests were merely the most recent in a long line of nuclear explosions beginning with the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. Over 2000 nuclear weapons have been detonated for testing purposes, over 500 in the atmosphere, under water or in space, and the rest underground. Of these about 1000 were conducted by the United States, 700 by the Soviet Union, 30 by the UK, 180 by France, 35 by China, 5 by India and 5 by Pakistan

           Some testing was also done with military personnel in the vicinity to determine military survivability and fighting capacity in a nuclear war. Research was also done on civilians exposed to radiation from nuclear testing to determine the effects of such exposure. Nuclear testing was also done in some cases for political purposes. India and Pakistan, for example, testing in 1998 in order to assert their status as nuclear weapon states.
 To get over these problems , few treaties were in action as follows . . .
1. Partial Test Ban Treaty 
In response to growing international awareness of the risks of radiation from nuclear tests, the Soviet Union, US and UK in 1963 negotiated an agreement to prohibit nuclear testing in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater .

2. Threshold Test Ban Treaty 
In 1974 the US and Soviet Union concluded the Threshold Test Ban Treaty under which they agreed not to conduct nuclear tests with an explosive yield over 150 kilotons (i.e. about 10 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb) .
3. Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
In 1996, the United Nations adopted the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which had been negotiated in the Conference on Disarmament. The CTBT prohibits all nuclear test explosions, including explosions for peaceful purposes .

4. Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation (C.T.B.T.O)             
The CTBT establishes an agency for its implementation including an international monitoring system (IMS) to assist in verification. The IMS comprises facilities owned by the CTBTO, and those owned and operated by States parties .

 *     One of the reasons for these tests is to upgrade existing weapons designs and test new designs. Following such tests under the "Stockpile Stewardship Program" the US, for example, has introduced a new weapon into its stockpile - the B61-mod11.

        The US and France are known to be constructing new facilities capable of conducting nuclear experiments including the National Ignition Facility in California, the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Testing Facility (DARHT) in Nevada and the Megajoule Facility in ? 

Do comment your views on my presentation !