Top 10 Indian newsmakers of 2011!

2011 has been a pretty interesting year in many terms. From the highs of India’s World Cup victory on April 2nd to the lows of the 2G scam and the death of many prominent personalities, we have seen it all. But nothing could beat Team Anna and their campaign to bring forward the Jan Lokpal Bill.

As far as the Indian industry is concerned, Infosys and Tata lost their captains to youngsters of the next generation. But Kingfisher began facing some serious turbulence in its flight of “Good Times”. “Kolaveri” and “Flash Mobs” became the buzzwords among all of us for their own reasons.

Indian Government now asks Google for Gmail Encryption!

Indian security agencies have suddenly gone into a tizzy. Over the last couple of years, terror attacks as well as terrorist threats have multiplied manifold across the nation. Internet has become de-facto mode of communication for most of these terrorist organizations. In a bid to track this communication, security agencies are trying to tap every internet channel.

They are now directly going after these websites / service providers which could be prone to being used by terrorists. The first target was RIM’s Blackberry where the data from where information came couldn’t be found out and this proved a security threat. After having a war of words with them, the government has given them a 31st January 2011 deadline to hand . And finally the thousands of Blackberry users in the country heaved a sigh of relief.

In a recent news, security agencies have also threatened to stop the 3G services in India as they are not able to track the conversations happening over 3G

And now the Indian government has trained its eyes on the third most popular email service in the world – Gmail to hand over its encryption keys.

Why the encryption keys cannot be handed over?

Be it Google, Gmail, Blackberry or any other site, encryption keys are used by sites to protect the users private data. Since these sites have information about people’s demographics, psychographic profile – leaving it out into the open could give rise to a huge number of problems.
What is the problem then?

The government has told Gmail to lower the encryption levels or hand over their keys so that they are able to monitor all the activities taking place.

This is beset with problems

This move by the government shows that our cyber cell is non – existent or completely pathetic. Our intelligence agencies seem to be asking for an easier route or lower encryption rather than improving their ability of decrypting higher levels of encryption.

Today they are banning Blackberry, tomorrow Gmail and day after Yahoo – like [^] this we are encouraging the terrorists of their aim to directly / indirectly affect Indian citizens. The terrorists seem much more technologically advanced than our RAW!

Maybe till the time we are able to decrypt higher levels of encryption, they would have gone on to much more intricate technology!

SCAMS – Shameless Callous Astonishing Manipulative Shocking

Scams are part and parcel of everyday life in India. I am sure scams happen everywhere around the world. But lets keep the article centric to India because I personally understand scams here in a better manner. SCAM tainted individuals have become so common in our society that its become the name of the game. No day goes by, without a scam being unearthed.

Satyam Scam, The Commonwealth Games Scam, Adarsh Housing Society Scam, 2G scam, Corporate Loan Bribery Scam – From ministers, to the army to corporates to even private players like Emaar – MGF, no one seems to be clean. And does anyone care? Not at all. Its all about “What’s the big deal? This happens in India every day” There are some common traits people involved in these scams possess -

Shameless – Be it Suresh Kalmadi, Ashok Chavan, Raja, Ramalinga Raju none of these individuals even care the harm to the nation, families and everyone else their acts have brought about. They are completely shameless and are just intent on doing one thing – USING THEIR POWER TO DO WHAT EVER WRONG THEY CAN WHICH THEY THINK IS ALWAYS RIGHT!

Callous – All of the individuals who have been involved in these scams are completely callous to their families, friends, companies, nation everyone. If they did care about anyone or for that matter even the nation’s pride, they wouldn’t do such a thing.

Astonishing – Astonishingly horrible in the acts they do. Be it Ramalinga Raju, Raja or Kalmadi all of them have played in billions of rupees. They must be saying “We play in billions and not thousands“.

Manipulative – All these individuals despite all the defense they mount are very scheming and manipulative. Take the example of Ramalinga Raju who was cheating everyone in his own company for more than a decade. This was the same company he gave birth to. He didn’t care about anything other than just making sure that he got the money wherever he wanted.

Shocking – The acts of these few individuals have always and will continue to bring shock and sadness to all the people related and unrelated to them along with the entire country. This is because things like what Raju, Raja, Kalmadi etc. did didn’t only affect the company or a few individuals but directly / indirectly affected millions of individuals.

Such SCAMsters need to be stopped in their tracks and such things are possible only if unique moves like starting an anti – corruption helpline start taking place (http://trak.in/tags/business/2010/11/29/anti-corruption-helpline-iim-students/).

Until then the shameless callous astonishing-ly manipulative shocking acts will keep going on.