Yantrakaal

The Chief Election Commissioner has recently stated that the EC is planning to use web and mobile based technology to allow citizens to cast their vote in local and national elections. Is this feasible? Will it be fair? Or secure? The challenge is indeed daunting but let us see how we can leverage an existing technology infrastructure to reach this goal easily and at a very low cost. Online voting is not a new idea. The Computer Society of India and many public limited companies are already using the internet to allow members and shareholders to vote by logging into websites. The challenge is to make sure that only those who are authorised to vote are allowed to login to the site and this is ensured by sending unique userids and passwords by email. Obviously this assumes that every member of the electorate has a valid and validated email ID. But this would not be true when we consider the kind of people who are voting in panchayat, municipal,  state legislature and Lok Sabha ...

This year, all of a sudden and perhaps for the first time since I have been visiting the Rabindra Sarovar in south Calcutta, we have had a small flock of painted storks staying over in the little island in the middle of the lake. Initially, I thought that they had come from Siberia or some other very cold place but it seems that is not quite true. They are native to India. this map shows the island where the pictures were taken

Folklore celebrates Shivaratri as the marriage of Lord Shiva with Parvati, the daughter of the Himalayan mountains. The consummation of this marriage is viewed in learned circles as the Yoga, or union, of Shiva with his Shakti. Of the Purusha with his Prakriti. Shiva is the Potential energy of the universe and Shakti is its manifestation in Kinetic form. From Sankara to Vivekananda, adepts have likened Shiva to the Ocean and Shakti to the waves that rise from it and settle back. But then again there is another perspective! Shiva is not a God, not even a god, in the traditional dualistic perspective of a devotee and the object of devotion. Shiva is a quality, the quality of "good", as understood in the phrase, "Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram" -- the triad of the the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Truth is viewed as function of rational analysis as in the search for the truth. This is the way of the West -- of Egypt, Greece, the Renaissance and modernity. This has...

We all know about the Andamans from our history books but rarely do we get the opportunity to experience the geography of this very picturesque part of India. Here is a short, photographic record of our visit to this little visited part of India. We arrived in Port Blair and walked into the pages of the history book that tells us about the Cellullar jail where so many freedom fighters, ( or "terrorists" from the British point of view) were incarcerated or even martyred. the outside of the jail inside the jail, during the Sound and Light Show inside one of the cells the long corridor along one of the wings view from the roof from the watch tower   these were the actual gallows where prisoners were executed and the picture below shows the oil mill that prisoners had to operate to produce their quota of coconut oil two of the jail wings from the watch tower   this is the room were Veer Savarkar was incarcera...