Guest Post: Time to WAKE UP – The authorities!!

There have been instances where we hear an industrialist gifting an aircraft to his wife on her birthday, some others gifting themselves a yacht when they feel like. These luxuries which the so called creme-da-la-creme call “high society” trademarks or “high society necessities” are good to look at from a global point of view. This can foresee that India is now a developing country with people who can, in theory, reach for the highest star or the deepest ocean. But is that all what you need to call India a developing country?

Doesn’t development mean that the politicians also take into view the development of the massive “middle class” which forms almost 80% of the population? Every year a new budget comes up from the economists and the finance ministry. But who do you think is really affected by that? It is by far only the “middle class” as they are the ones who suffer the burn of the hour. With the amount of money earned becoming equal to the amount of money spent to earn a livelihood by the “middle class” ; I am not sure how the survival of the fittest would take place in here.

26/11 at Taj vs AMRI hospital at Kolkata – How are they similar but different?

When an Indian is reminded about the date – 26/11, all he can think of is terror, bomb blasts, attacks, death, blood, gore, disaster everything that could spoil the happiness of a human being. It is synonymous with one of the worst periods of our times when everyone across the nation especially Mumbai and the Taj had to go through hours of hell. On the other hand, the AMRI hospital tragedy today at Kolkata is another addition to the growing list of incidents which makes you think that human life in this country has no value at all.

But why am I linking the two incidents as different as chalk and cheese? An incident which was the result of a terrorist attack and another which was due to a fire can be related? Am I out of my mind? Is it my opinionated mind at work? Whatever you think, there is a small similarity but a small difference!!

Book Review – The Patriot

To be truthful I hadn’t ever heard of this book or the author. A couple of weeks back I got an email from him asking me to review his labour of love. I immediately checked out the synopsis and was hooked on. A novel on marine terrorism and that too by an Indian author is as rare as it can get.

The book goes with the tagline: Terror on the High Seas. Going through the cover with the image showing a very rough sea and a ship – INS Indraprastha in the background, you start thinking that this is going to be a real thrill ride.

With over two hundred thousand metric tonnes of highly volatile crude oil, she is a massive Indian flag merchant vessel sailing in the Arabian Sea towards Cochin in India. But in between the ship is hijacked by 9 highly equipped terrorists who with their Kalashnikov’s and grenade launchers look ready for a grueling mission. They plant underwater mines around the hull in front of the captain’s eyes. What is their aim? Will their mission succeed? Why does one of the terrorists change sides midway? The book tackles all these questions and more.

Is joining a bandwagon the best way to solve a problem?

Anna Hazare’s Jan Lokpal movement, Terrorism, News coverage on any issue by our TRP loving news channels etc. etc. – Wondering what am I talking about? How can all these things have any relation at all, right? WRONG! There is a small but very important thread which connects these things which are generally as diverse as chalk and cheese. Joining the bandwagon is often referred to as ‘copycat’ behaviour in blunt terms. But is copycat behaviour really bad? Obviously for something like the Anna Hazare movement or cricket fanaticism it shouldn’t be bad, right?

A lot of people in this world are normally jobless. Obviously jobless really doesn’t mean the people who are actually ‘Below the Poverty Line’ and don’t really have any work at all. I am referring to people who have jobs but just love to fight for a cause however good or bad it may be. And they may fight for a cause despite the fact that they may not know much about it.

A review – Did “SriLanka’s killing fields!” actually happen?

Soliders are killing people in the head and ready to take their dead bodies as trophies!

The army is continously bombing in the no – fire zones and killing innocent civilians!

Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam (LTTE) is using innocent civilians as human shields whenever they try to escape!

A soldier yells loudly on seeing the naked raped and murdered corpse of a innoncent civilian “She has the best body of the lot!”

These and many more scenes make up the chilling documentary aptly called “SriLanka’s Killing Fields” prepared by Channel 4 after what they call more than 2 years of painstaking research. Painstaking it surely must have been because they didn’t have any evidence to go by as the remaining international UN, Red Cross and other relief agencies were instructed to leave the area at the beginning of the army’s surge to the north to crush the rebels once and for all.

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!