Brutal carnage in Mumbai: Whom to assign Blame?

I was surprised not to see any blame going to state and local level politics in India, who control the law and order machinery. Federal government could do only so much, and it is the state governments with all the police power that must ensure blocking low level crimes that feed into the high level terrorists. Mumbai has long been under the control of Mafias, and with their low level networks and access to money, it would be hard to stop the terrorists unless we stop these mafias. But, many of them have connections with all level of local politicians. So, we need a powerful police force that can stand independent of the corrupted local politicians. As KPS Gill showed in Punjab, an effective police force can neutralize even the most brutal of terrorist forces.

Unlike in the case of September 11th New York and July 7th London, Mumbai or for that matter any major Indian city, is not new to massive attacks. New York and London and Madrid were genuinely surprised by the scale and nature of attacks and made a massive ramp up in Law & Order to thwart any further attacks. India doesn't seem to have done too much as continued instances show. Taj is the center place for all powerful people visiting India, including Presidents and CEOs and how come dozens of terrorists entered there with weapons and with intimate awareness of the hotel? What were the intelligence and security forces doing, leaving such a high profile place loosely guarded?

What is the nature of the past investigations with the prior Indian terror attacks? There are no verdicts on any of the cases in the recent terror attacks. What are the courts, CBI and rest of the machinery doing?

We have been witnessing disaster situations of every kind. From nature created Tsunamis, earthquakes, floods to man-made terrorism, stampedes, fires and carnage of all flavors. Why is there no national policy on an effective answer to disaster, like the one Israel has. We need a national level preparatory education that would teach the common public on ways to deal with a crisis situation - and we need to integrate NCC and other grassroot level forces to make a combined national preparation against emergencies. We might have to make a mandatory short military training programs at the college level, so that we can better supplement the government forces. With its relatively smaller army (compared to population) and an ineffective police force, India is right now uncontrollable and unprepared.

The terrorism answer must focus on starting from preventing the lowest level crimes and flouting of the rules. As the book "The Tipping Point" and the "Broken window theroy" show, once the bad sections of the society realizes that they can go scot-free on most of the smaller crimes, they will tend to increase in scale and things will start to snow ball.

Tamil Language Sources

Tamil General:
Thamizh Thai Vazhthu - An anthem for Tamils
Tamil language & culture reference books

Language:
Introduction to Tamil Language
Tamil Learning Tools
Tamil Dictionary
Grantha Script

Culture:
Tamil proverbs
Tamil festivals
Tamil Marriage Songs
Simple Kolams
64 Traditional arts

Religion and Devotional:
12 holy books for tamils
Tiruvasagam
Thirupavai
Thiruvempavai
Devaram - Part 1
Devaram - Part 2

Arts:
Tamil Music - Part I
Carnatic Music and Bharatha Natyam

History:
Great Tamil saints
Great Tamil rulers

Tamil Literature:
Tamil ebook collection
List of Tamil publishers
Tamil magazines and newspapers
Chronology of Tamil literature - Part 1
Chronology of Tamil Literature - Part 2
Aathichuvai & Kondrai Vendan
Early 20th century novels

English Translations:
Sivagamiyin Sabadhan - English
Periyapuranam English condensation

Movies:
Old Tamil Movies
Links to a collection of Movie related resources

Pluto - No longer a planet

In an interesting move, a large body of astronomers collected under the aegis of IAU (International Astronomers Union) decided to demote the status of Pluto to a dwarf planet, instead of regular planet. It means our solar system has only 8 planets and not 9, as we studied till now.

The declassification seems to have been done in view of a majority's concerns of Pluto being a largely frozen surface and dissimiliar in composition to the other 8 planets, and 3 other bodies in the solar system - Charon 3, a satellite of Pluto, 2003 UB313, and a huge asteroid between Mars and Jupiter qualify to become a planets, if Pluto (with relaxed admission norms) continues to be accepted as a planet.

Lots of rewriting of school textbooks needs to be done, around the world :)

How do you feel, having to lose one interesting planet from our system?

References:

World mourns poor Pluto's plight

Pluto Loses Designation, Sues IAU

Is 8 enough- Reaction mixed to Pluto's demotion

Pluto No Longer Considered a Planet

World moving toward mediocrity

This is one topic that is troubling me for the last few years. Is the world moving towards mediocrity? Every era had its share of great persons in every field and the process of producing the greats kept on getting accelerated ever since 15th century. People like da Vinci, Newton, Keppler, Bismark, Adam Smith, Shakesphere... kept on arising in various fields and created various fields and revolutionized the entire society.

By the dawn of 20th century the process was in extreme speed. The world was seeing doyens like Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Neils Bohr, Alan M. Turing, Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Max Plank, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Swami Vivekananda, Wright Brothers, Marconi, Edison, von Neumann and Claude Shannon.

But, can you name any living person now or any person born in our era (after 1930) who could belong to this hall of fame, of the world greats?

The world during the period of 1870 to 1930 saw so many inventions and breakthroughs. Extrordinary breakthroughs in Physics came in the form of Quantum theory, Electromagnetic theory, electricity, radio transimission, Semiconductors, Superconductivity, Radioactivity and Relativity (... I cant recount every great thing) and great inventions came in the form of telephone, radio, x-rays, electric motors, automobiles, airplanes, microwaves, movies.... How many great things have we invented in our era?

Where do we get to see physists like Einstein, Bohr, Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, Nichol Tesla, Feynmann and Mathematicians like Kurt Godel, Ramanujam, David Hilbert, Max Plank, Turing, Claude Shannon, in the current era? Where do we get the great economists like Keynes and Fisher or psychologists like Freud? Can you name atleast one great inventor of current time, whose work could be compared with Edison or Bell or Wright Brothers or Neumann? Why didnt we have such great persons in our era? Why the flame of the greats got almost extinguished by the 1960's? If we ask a person in 1940 about the list of top 10 all-time great physists, the list would countain atleast half from their own time. But, what about now? Can you name atleast one current physist who could be placed in the all-time list?

How many great breakthroughs in Computer Science are brought after its first 20 years? We are using almost the same model of Turing and most of the concepts (right from databases to algorithms to networks) are just refined, polished and engineered, but nothing revolutionarily new is produced that is comparable to the works of the first 20 years. Why didnt we do much in space sciences after 1960's and why didnt we produce any great airplane in the last 40 years?

In the previous era, world saw extrordinary leaders in the form of Winston Churchill, Roosevelt, Gandhi, Nehru, Mao, Hilter and Stalin (the last two are criminals against humanity) who commanded uncomparable control over their regions. There were extraordinary literary persons like Emerson, Mark Twain, Ayn Rand and Bernard Shaw.... There were these uncomparable aggressive businessmen like Herny Ford, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Alfred P. Sloan (the man who broughtup General Motors) . Where are their successors?

While we should expect the process of producing great things should have accelerated in the last 70 years, with the revolutions in communication and transportaion and globalization, it is dissapointingly low. I suspect that there is something that is fundamentally wrong. The great instituitions like MIT, Princeton, Cornell and Stanford are no longer producing great things that can change humanity. The papers are more of engineering improvements than revolutionizing things. The professors produce more of good works than extraordinary breakthroughs.

Fundamentally, there is an enormous pressure to perform. Students have to worry about careers, PhD candidates have to worry about graduating, professors have to worry about tenures and later a decent publication career. And this produces the fear that acts against the guts to produce something new. If a physics student proposes for something like a work of general theory of relativity or if a computer science student produces a new computing model, it will most probably be rejected and the admission committee or later the professor might advice the guy to work towards more ahievable goals. And the student might not have guts to go further and work against all odds and might even quit researching.

Thus, we are caught in a circle of mediocrity and we need great force to break this cycle. For this to happen, the current era people have to realize that history would call us the era of mediocrity and to avoid that we need to do something revolutionary.