Bribes in India - a historical perspective.

It can be your local police, the traffic hawildar , or even someone as simple as a Electric company agent who you call.... ALL of them need money to work.(apart from the salary they get). I am just curious why this happens... why do those bribe askers ,feel its right to ask for bribes to begin with, in other wise morally good society.. ?

Then I went back and studied the demographics of these incidences... apparently north is afflicted by this more than either the west ,east or south of india. Then, it was relatively easy to relate it with the history of the places.

North has been unable to defend itself from hoards of barbaric invaders and then the british imperialists. Typically under these regimes , there was a lot of tax to hindus(jaziya) and few for muslims.

Typically poor people (mostly from lower strata of hindu society) who were fed up by hindu high-casts readily converted to islam.They had couple of advantages doing this. Firstly, they could now be associated with the ruling class instead of being the very bottom of the pyramid.
Now if they proved their worth, they had a chance to attach with a new (relatively nomadic anyways) gene pool of mongols and tatars.

The dynamics of hindu society also changed here. Now the brahmins who were related to the religious structure were extremely aggravated by this since their religious authority was challenged.The Kings who belonged to the kashatriya class were also aggravated by these barbarians who were challenging their rule. The nobles under the king didnt give much fuck because they had their positions no matter who the king was.

A typical comparison in todays world is takeover of a company by other corporation. The new corporation being not as efficient , but having many more resources at its disposal.

Now, the converted class began hating their original hindu higher caste socials. And from this began the culture of demeaning each others religion. The response of hindus was to be morally and intellectually on a higher plane than the bulk of muslims and the new-muslims(low caste hindus).
A point worth noticing is most of the muslims who came to india were either mamaluk (slaves) or mongols(barbaric decendants of genjis kahn).


The other defense mechanism of people like the nobles(sardars) , brahmins was to form a unit which operated on themselves and sustained because of their financial abilities. Muslim couldn't see this game. Now even though the rulers were muslims, the rich class was mostly hindus or other dharmic religions, owners of land were also hindus, so their power increased even under a muslim leader.

The next step obviously was to corrput the law-enforcers by paying them personally. So if you want a jaziya of 10% on my 1000000 mohurs , then I will simply ask you to look the other way for 100 mohurs. Quite frankly the man who was in that post an earlier low-class hindu now a muslim had nothing to do with empire anyways. They had low morals, and hence could easily accept bribes.

Over years this culture developed and was ingrained in the societies of northern india.More so in north west.

Now if we take a look at south, those guys decided to strive for a bigger cause, a hindu empire , marathas and the other people of north india thus had some onus of responsibility and morality. Then its easy to see that these guards wouldnt accept bribes since for them the country was their own, and ruled by their own.


So, in conclusion bribery developed as a counter measure to meaningless and exploitative laws by foreign empires ruling india, a kind of insulation against bad governance that happened in north india for like a thousand years. I am pretty sure moguls were :D very very distressed by this problem and didnt give a shit later on.Leading into rise of noblemen's power.

Then its not a surprise that north indians state have higher corruption perception indexes than states that had local kings. If someone were to do a study on this, I am 100% sure that foreign rule would co-relate very-very highly with bribe givers/takers.


Now, solution is going to be TIME. When people understand and the goveernment really does work for the people, then the general apathetic feeling among officers will eventually decrease resulting into accountability and less corruption.

Another Terrorist Attack

Again, the same story. Bombs go off in mumbai's populated areas in order to pay tribute to Kasab (the terrorist who cause 26/11).

Sonia Gandhi led Indian National Congress government at center removed POTA and TADA , laws that were key in processing cases that involved terrorist.

In other news, government wants to pass a "minority protection" bill.This bill will attack the majority(india is 80% hindu) of people who target the minority. A simple example: In 2k1 , some muslim people burned train that contained karsevaks(hindus) who were were returning from uttar pradesh's Ayodha sector. These people werent allowed to step out from train and were burned alive.

A massive riot followed killing 1.2k people out of which ~800 people were muslims.

Now who is responsible for this ? If the government wasnt able to protect the hindus burned, why do they want to meddle in the aftermath when the responsible group gets its just punishment ?

Even after giving 1/3rd of Whole-Indian-lands to their dedicated cause, if they are still going to bomb the hindus,

If this is the outcome that we are going to suffer for being secular , Fuck all that secular bullshit...I am a fundamentalist.


Get the fuck off our lands ....


I dont find apt bad-words for that foreigner led government.... Go back to italy.


And gandhi, the whole root cause of being a pathetic state who refuses to act and proceeds to talk, fuck him , fuck his ideologies . We have had enough bullshit thrown in our mouth becuase of that retarded fuck old man whos teaching are worthless(for india today).


Everything that happens has happened, and his grand grand son comments we are able to avoid 99% attacks.

XFCE UBuntu

Awesome ubuntu distro with the light weight xfce interface. Its pretty neat, esp, if you do not want all the glitter effects on your desktop ,and your more interested in raw-information based view.

ultimate as good as tiny linux ,but with far improved pkg.

Where to invest your brain/goals of life.

Most difficult of philosophical questions.It seems many people have thought over this. In general I would say that goals are very much dependent on society you live in, and there can be no such globally(time/space) optimal goal.

Which means: the goals that human can go after are highly suited to their society. Society in turn changes with time. So, goals are ever changing entity which is dependent on a changing social variables.

The only fields that I think remain consistent over time are in general related to maths and science.Mostly maths. Addition cannot be replaced by something like it in near future and it will continue to remain as important as it was when it was invented for example. Same for 0.

In hindu texts, purushartha or the goals of masculine are given as dharma,artha,kama,moksha.

-dharma is dedicated to follow path of good, and build up good karma.

-Artha seems close to goals of modern society, and it relates to agglomerating wealth ,pursuit of meaning.

-Kama : sexual pleasure , this would probably be most important in ancient times.

-moksha: liberation from birth/death cycle... I am not sure about this one. as their are no means to know if it exsists.


One thing to notice here is , this arrangement is so broad that it can classify into one of 4 categories any of the goals of humans irrespective of time space. bravo for that.


This gives me an idea. Design a system that will given the amount of free time, and genericness or specialization of a particular goal, will provide the optimal goal. This can then be classified into global or local levels etc. I can think of 100k details of this now. Does anyone know if such system exsists ?

Foreign people pronouncing your name

Its often the case that people of a foreign land will probably pronounce your name in some other way. I think they try to relate it to their own speech/langauge. My name is Nikhil. During my univ stay , here at baltimore ,usa , I have found many different ways that I can pronounce my name.

One observation is , different groups in america will pronounce it differently, and all the people of that group will pronounce it in the same way. (Based on my observation, which is atleast 5 different people from same group).

I'll add new entries as I get to hear them. Also remember that they werent just given the name and told to speak. In each case I had pronounced my name loud-and-clear.


1. Arabs,irani,afgani,yemen,etc :
nikhil becomes ni-khai-el (to me this sounds kyrgiz or russian like mikhail)

2. mostly white of baltimore area(I dont know where they actually come from):
nikhil becomes nicole or ni-kh-ole (damn! I dont like this one bit...)

3. black of baltimore area(dont know where they come from,must admit this happend only 3times):
nikhil became nicolai? (I dont get the relation in this one).

4. chini people(dont know actual origin):
nikhil --> nikeel (no 'ha' sound at all)

so till now

pronounce={nikhil,nikeel,nicolai? ,nicole,nikhail}

[:D] I just think this is funny.


I think this is natural,but I would like to think that I would be able to pronounce foreign names more accurately in first try.


One indication is that this means usa is a diverse country , and if this continues , it will probably end up like India one day.

Pthreads

During my work on thesis, now I am in need of thread api. My default choice is pthread on C. Why? I know C since bachpan, and pthread seems to be the most matured of all the multithreading things present out there. Though its an overkill to actually understand everything in that posix thread standard. I think it'd be beneficial in long run. so, yeah ima sweating on pthreads...

heres a decent tutor for pthreads:
https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/pthreads/

ASM on 64 bit platform vs 8086 asm

Over some years ago, I had learned great deal of assembly, essentially the 8086 instruction set.
Part of the reason was, that I used in in my undergrad project.

Now,after like 4-5 yrs I am again trying to see the assembly code(thanks gcc for providing conversion) ,and MAN! that code I do not recognize, movl, movd, movq ,movzbl there are like a thousand variations of mov itself ...

although feels good to see at something you did long ago...

:)