Lead India

The other day I turned on the TV to watch the last round of the Lead India campaign on Star One. There had been a bit of a buzz in the office about this, with people saying that oh, any educated leader is better than the uneducated louts we have now while I waged a lonely battle on the "disagree" side. I only get to hear of happenings from my wife who does read newspapers, so I was vaguely aware of the kind of messages that were coming out of the campaign. Here's on - "our taxation policy is regressive. Taxing the rich means taxing efficiency" No surprise that, since ToI is a capitalist organisation that benefits greatly from the status quo. It would have surprised me to hear even a vaguely socialist message come out of this campaign, but dear readers, nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to see. The damn thing was a quiz show. One hour of bollywood and cricket questions with Aditya Birla and Akshay Kumar (two other status-quoists) dispensing advice on how to build a country (lagan, mehnat, imandari). While one might say that ToI is a cynical organisation that plays upon people's hopes and frustrations, it was still shocking that they wouldn't even make the minimum effort to give the campaign some credibility. In the end Lead India is nothing but reality TV, with the emphasis on TV. So, I went about the web to see what I might have missed in the previous episode's and I found that political discourse in India is dead as dodoes. Youtube? All commercials. Blogs - zero. Lead India site? Spambots. Here are some screenshots and links. YouTube Search Random Discussion Board Up Close and Personal Do check out the comments in the discussion board and draw your own conclusions about the depth of political discourse in this country. While the country cheers Modi to power and corporate control of the government grows unabated, the rest of the country is worried that their future leader may not know which actress played Sanjay Dutt's wife in Mission Kashmir. It is beyond pathetic.

Lead The World Hall of Fame Finals

Welcome to [Main Sponsor] Lead The World - A [Promoter's Name] Initiative's special Hall of Fame edition of [Main Sponsor] Lead India - A [Promoter's Name] Initiative. So, we have with us today amongst the finest of leaders, political philosophers, thinkers and writers of all ages, and we shall be testing their skills in our crucible of fire, roasting their nuts so to speak, about the burning (no pun intended) issues of the day. First up let me introduce, a man who needs no introduction, the inventor of Communism - Karl Marx. Karl, first question for you - the best thing about religion is -?

Karl: Religion is the op...

Wrong, our SMS polls show that 70% of the people say c) the cute gods, 14% say c) no cute little gods and the rest were pretty much divided equally amongst the cross, the turbans, that blue color and a very small minority reporting that it was all that gazing in rapture at the face of the lord that one gets to do after one is dead. Sorry Karl, your answer does not match those of the population at large. Granted, you have spent many decades thinking long and hard about the oppression suffered by all the poor people...but the best you could come up with is two long and boring books? Thankfully, here in a democracy we go by the will of the people, so minus 5 for you!

Next up, another man who needs no introduction - the Father of Our Great Nation - Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma, what would you say your greatest leadership moment was?

Gandhiji: I would say that it would have to be the first time I realised that hope is not lost, that the revolutionary spirit lives. It must have been Septem....

Wrong, 93% of people report that Independence Day 1947 was your greatest leadership moment.

Gandhiji: But...but millions died that night. It was a terrible night. While Nehru was reading out his speech in Delhi, I was in Calcutta, watching the nation be divided. In the west, yet another limb was being amputated. Borders drawn. Walls built. Armies drawn up. And the killings - the trainloads of dead, the scarred and mutilated survivors of will to power. Till today these divisions are robbing those poor, deluded souls of their right to peace and goodwill towards all, their right to a better life. How can you even dream that it was the best night of my life?

Be that as it may MG, in a democracy, the people are always right. Who are you to say that the uneducated man has no right to a voice? Why is your opinion, and I stress, all of these are only opinions, "better" than the man on the street's? Are you some kind of fascist?

After the break, Noam Chomsky.

Distro-whoring

The last few months have been months of rediscovery for me. On a whim, in October, I decided to download Ubuntu Linux. It was cropping up more and more frequently in web pages I was viewing and as an old (albeit lapsed) Linux hand - my first Linux box was in 1995. I wept when I got it to answer the phone - I was curious to try it out. Thanks to India's shitty broadband, it took effing forever to download the image but once done and burnt onto a CD, it represented the state-of-the-art in Linux desktops as well as the present culmination of the efforts of million of open-sourcers all over the world.

Pop in the CD, boot to the live Ubuntu OS, click install, partition the disk and away we go - a free, brand-spanking-new operating system that does pretty much as advertised - it just works. The web is full of reviews of Ubuntu so I won't go into details about this particular flavour of Linux. What impressed me most is the giant steps that Linux has taken since my last immersion in 2004 - running Fedora. I remember spending most of my time searching for rpms to resolve all kinds of dependencies and eventually breaking the system. Ubuntu's (or rather Debian's) apt package manager also represents one of the finest tools to add and remove software. Want to install a different desktop? sudo apt-get install kubuntu. Lamp server? apt-get install php apache mysql. You get the idea. Truly stunning. Coming from windows, it was such a refreshing change instead of going to three different websites, downloading three different installers, etc. And all the software is free so no annoying popups, credit card reminders or lame demo versions.

The other big improvement is in the desktop managers. I haven't tried out KDE too much but GNOME is certainly ready for the prime time. It is pleasing on the eye, well laid out and comes with all sorts of cool panel applets - my favourite being deskbar, the file and application search tool that mimics apple's Spotlight. DVD and USB drives are mounted automatically and most hardware works out of the box. As though this wasn't enough, you can turn on sexy 3D effects with compiz-fusion (check it out on YouTube). With all this lovely compositing action going on, your desktop turns into a slick, shiny workspace with spinning and weaving windows and nice shiny screenlets for everything from calendars to now-playing.

Is Linux ready for the desktop? Let me put it this way - my mom runs Linux. Granted she only surfs the web with it, but she's had no problems so far. The one area where Ubuntu really has to make up ground is in the multimedia space, although this is more an issue with restrictive licensing issues (lame, aac, etc) as well as poor support from hardware vendors.

Anyways, it took me no time to become bored of Ubuntu. I don't think it really deserves all the hype it gets. For one, it looks really ugly. I suppose when it came out it was the dogs bollocks and all, but there are so many nicer looking distros out there. Sure you can customize it to look whichever way you want but it still is nice to have a really pretty distro out of the box. Secondly, with anything that is hyped so much, you got to look around and see whether the hype is justified, so it was with a sense of eager curiosity that I set out to find my perfect distro..

I next tried out Mandriva 2008 and it totally blew me away. It had like six window managers on the install CD that I got with Linux For You magazine. It was faaaaast, compared to Ubuntu. I always had trouble with the 3d effects in Ubuntu (I run a four year old 2.60 Ghz comp with 1.5 GB ram, but no GPU for graphics processing.) but Mandriva delivered them slick like anything. I found no annoyances with Mandriva, except it didn't properly configure my sound system. Took me half a minute to fix. At about this time I decided to blow XP off my disk once and for all, so a reformat of the hard drive left me wondering again what OS I need to run now. I turned to PCLinuxOS, the other highly hyped Linux distro in town..

PCLinuxOS's hardware detection and configuration is second to none. The whole shebang just worked out of the box, wireless network card included. Beautiful. Starting 3d effects is a breeze with drak3d. Is Linux ready for the desktop? Absolutely, but this is boring? Where are my config files and whats with all this gui stuff? Enter Arch Linux..

Arch is the Linux for Linuxers, not Windows users whose MS loyalties are being tested by Vista and can't afford a Mac. A really small download (250 MB) and a quick install and you're presented with a text login prompt. Time to build your system from the ground up. This time I decided to try out XFCE for the window manager as I wanted something lightweight and snappier than GNOME. Arch uses the excellent pacman package manager, so a quick pacman -S xfce4 xfce-goodies thunar firefox (and a long wait for the download) and poof, graphical desktop. I was expecting XFCE to be feature poor compared with GNOME but it is a really sweet and elegant desktop. It has native compositing support (as does GNOME), so no need to load up compiz-fusion just to get the nice shiny screenlets. Arch is entirely configured with .conf files and you know what? I love it! No more mismatches between your icon-configured network and the actual system config files (spend some time doing wireless on ubuntu and you'll know what I mean). It boots FFFFAAAAST and shutdowns in an instant. It is very very cool. I have decided to use archLinux as my main distro for the time being, but what will happen to all the other nice distros? No problem - Virtualbox to the rescue..

The first thing I did was install XP as a virtual machine. It works fine. Virtualbox even sets up a network proxy for the virtual machine so networking works out of the box with no configuration. Sweet. My little hack-lab is up and running..

Next up? Linux mint..

Here's a small screenshot of me running Mint in a virtual machine under arch. The terminal is the lovely tilda, a nice transparent terminal, one keystroke away. Nice work..

More linux updates in subsequent posts. Try Linux out. If you're a windows switcher, try Mint. If you lnow your way around Linux, try arch. It is sweet.

Money - Easy Come Easy Go

As we stand on the brink of the second major economic collapse of this century, it would behoove us as thinking people to ask what is happening, why is it happening and what can be done about it. By the time you are done reading this, you should hopefully be thinking that I am crazy. That the world can't possibly be so screwed up - but, you say, we have responsible people, adults, experts running things. Do you really mean to tell me that they screwed up so bad? Well, depends what you mean by screwed up. A common mistake to make is to believe that our interests are the same as those of the economic and political elites that run the show. By their own yardstick, they have not screwed up. In fact, they might be well on their way to consolidating immense power, replete with nuclear arms and starving uneducated populations. It will make medieval feudalism seem like a walk in the park, and 1984 seem like a children's fairy tale.

By now, everyone pretty much has heard of the subprime crisis underway in America. It is taking its toll on the credit markets, leading investment banks have announced huge writedowns, 180+ US mortgage lenders have gone bankrupt in the past year, 100,000+ financial sector jobs have been lost in the US alone, several European banks have had to bailed out with taxpayer money.....the list goes on. It is bad. The largest asset class in the world - US RMBS - has halted in its tracks and there seems to be no hope of any new issuance in the near future.

You might well wonder, how is it that the collapse of the housing sector in America can send shockwaves through the world markets? The standard reason being offered is that subprime loans made to people with bad credit and sold onwards into pools of mortgage backed securities started defaulting. Combined with heavy leverage on the part of investors this means that even small losses could wipe out many participants, thus magnifying the effect. Further leverage added through CDOs and CDO-squareds has exacerbated this problem. while this view is correct, it still misses an important point - the inevitability of this occurence, not in any mystic "human nature" kind of way but with the cold, steel determinism of a machine set into motion.

The machine in question here is the world's monetary systems. Money is everywhere now. The old gift and barter economies have all but died and the vast majority of transactions between people are intermediated by currency. Everyone wants money, in many places of the world accumulation of money is the highest virtue, exceeded only by the virtue of spending it. Here, in the world's poorest country, we host a large number of the world's wealthiest men, and we're proud of it (though that is a blog post for another day). Everywhere you look, being rich rich rich has never been more in fashion. Yet, if you ask a lay person - where does money come from? - chances are you will be met with a blank stare. At this point, let us take an informal poll: Where does money come from? a) Backed by gold b) Out of thin air

The truth of the matter is that money comes out of thin air. If you go to a bank and take a loan of Rs. 60 lakhs to say, buy a house or something, the bank literally creates Rs. 60 lakhs out of thin air and writes you a check. This is the beauty of fractional reserve banking. The bank needs only a small fraction of money and a banking license, and it can then go and simply create the money it needs to lend out. Not only that, when you buy your house and the seller deposits his check in the banking system, the bank can use that new deposit to back a further loan and so on and so forth until the bank is collecting interest on an amount hundreds of times larger than it's original capital. That EMI that you pay back diligently every month, for which you go to work each day, actually cost the lender nothing. It's the kind of news that will make you want to go straight into denial, leaving the anger phase to manifest itself in uncontrollable tics and tourette's syndrome. For a more detailed explanation of this process, please check out Banking and Scheming on google video. Watch all five parts. You will never look at money the same way again.

Now unfortunately, the banks only create enough money to pay back the principal. Where does the interest come from? This is where I will strain your credulity - the money to pay interest is never created. You have to earn it out of the available pool of money, and this is why the available pool of money must keep growing. Since money is created when debt is incurred, more and more debt must be incurred to bring this money into the economy, adding to the interest burden further until the debt monster gets to eat everything up. Why do you think there are guys at petrol pumps trying to sell you credit cards. Why are banks desperate to make loans? Do check out the video above - it makes everything crystal clear. So to sum up - some guy with a banking license can conjure up money out of thin air, lend it to you and then rule your every waking moment. We have all read the cases of people who committed suicide when the harassment became unbearable. All this for some pieces of paper? It doesn't sound like it might be real.

Money, in the end, is a collective delusion. It works because people believe that they can exchange those rupees for real goods and services at some time in the future. What they fail to realise is that the system is doomed to end badly. It is no surprise that the current credit crisis is affecting the most capitalistic economy of all. Since 1912, which saw the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the US economy has been a slave to the cartel of bankers that started the Fed. I bet you thought that the Federal Reserve - which is the US Central Bank and sole authority to print dollars - was a government organisation. Would it rock your world a little to find out that it is a privately held corporation whose major shareholders are not known and which has never been audited? We do not even know the names of the people who elect the Fed Chairman - the most powerful banker in the world (that we know of). Does all this sound very conspiracy theorist kookie? I can swear that every word is true. Watch "America: From Freedom to Fascism"

Subprime is not the disease - it is merely a symptom of a system that can only survive through expansion of credit. At some point, you can only grow the credit base by lending to people who would never ever get credit in a sane world. Can you imagine lending $750,000 to an immigrant fruit-picker who makes $14,000 a year? Or a thrity year loan made to a 90 year old man? This is the machine at work - constantly expanding credit base followed by Depression. And consider for a moment all the effects that this imaginary thing called money has on the real world, the world with forests and streams and houses and people - increasing the credit base means increasing consumption and so we have all manner of fancy toys - nokias, iPhones, Hummers, pearl earrings, Ikea furniture, DVD players cheaper than shorts - all these things have to be produced to create the demand for credit. Yes, they are advanced and yes they are shiny and cool to show off, but our consumption is causing huge amounts of pollution - so huge infact that our biosphere is collapsing. As a race, it seems we are no smarter than yeast.

We stand today at the rim of an abyss, which some people are already calling the Greater Depression. What will it look like? I see it as the Great Depression on amphetamines. Here's what happened in the past (and what we can expect in the future)

• - first of all, millions of bankruptcies. The credit bubble that made people millionaires will claim an equal number of victims on the way down. These people will be unable to access any credit and whatever they earn will have to go towards satisfying their creditors. These people will be in debt to the banks and the government to an extent resembling slavery.

• - total breakdown of economic relations. In a world where money intermediates every economic relation, no money equals no economic relations. (Society will still retain its productive capacity but there will be no way to exchange them for each other. If hyperinflation sets in, we will see firsthand what happens to a society built on such a monetary system. We have only heard tales of the Weimar Republic. Now we might get to see it for real.)

• - Increasing power concentration. The last Great Depression was only ended by massive amounts of war spending. The "land of the free" became the land where the government would confiscate your gold. First, the powers that be string you along by your purse strings, then they bankrupt you and then they come take everything you have left. Capitalism needs workers and soldiers, and this is one way of getting them. The Second World War saw American political power solely concentrated in the hands of the big defence contractors, oil men and multinational corporations where it remains to this day.

• -War. The last Great Depression only ended due to the massive sacrifices made during the biggest conflagration ever experienced by the world, ending finally with the explosion of two, utterly redundant, utterly horrendous and morally repugnant atom bombs. With the war providing such a large economic impetus, it is no wonder that the Western world saw unprecedented prosperity in the post-war years. While we're on the topic of atom bombs, consider for a moment the nature of the people who run our planet - People who think nothing of dropping atomic weapons on civilian populations just so you can show Stalin how big your balls are? Watch "Why We Fight" for the total lowdown on the military-industrial complex. (America's top offices are occupied by an oil man and a defence contractor and we wonder what the war in Iraq is about.)

• - Shortly after the '29 depression, the gold standard was abolished leading to the ability to print unlimited amounts of money. This gave great power to the banking cartels that run the world's economies. Postwar prosperity was shortlived, and birthed the recurrent financial crises we see - Asia 97, Russia 98, Dot-com 2001 and the daddy of them all - housing 2007. In the final analysis, it seems that all of capitalism's claims to being fair and making the pie bigger etc are phoney claims, meant to prop up sympathy for a rapacious, unhealthy and morally repugnant philosophy that holds consumption and personal comforts as the highest goods and cares not a whit for the health of society at large and the planet as a whole. It is clearly unsustainable and we are seeing the end. The economic and moral ideology which promised riches for all will be seen in the future as the biggest disaster to ever have visited the planet.

To sum up, to say that todays credit crisis is due to subprime mortgages is like saying that World War I started due to the assasination of Archduke Ferdinand. The powers that be will always present wars as some "accident" of history, lest their cleverly planned schemes come under scrutiny from troublesome populations. In the case of the credit crisis, the symptoms are again being presented as a disease and for the same reasons.

I find that the full implications of this present nature of money take some time to sink in and be understood. I do hope you will follow the links provided and then return for a discussion in the comments section.

Project Carpool Update

After several months of intensive coding, an upgrade to Project Carpool is now available. The url is http://patang.org/projects/carpool/ Many new features have been made available. Some of them are

• Wikimapia search interface - search for any place on Planet Earth using text.
• PhpBB Integration - Users are signed up and for the accompanying phpBB forums automatically. Login is automatic. phpBB provides a private messaging mechanism between users so that your email address remains secure. In addition, it provides a platform for community discussion.
• Groups - Start a group and share trips only with your colleagues and friends. Protect your privacy.
• Pleasing additions to the user-interface....

Some things yet to be implemented properly include better trip management so users can easily accept ridesharers, delete trips etc. A low-bandwidth and mobile version also need to be implemented. Also, a version that looks as pretty in IE as it does in Firefox. Currently, IE does not seem to be happy with the rounded corners and hover effects that show up just fine in Firefox, but I think that's a discussion best left to developers. Here are some screenshots

Logged in

Searching for location by name

Searching for trips starting in a 2km radius from Mani Bhavan

Sometimes it seems like this application is never going to get out of beta....though that's not such a bad club to be in per se ;-) I am looking for developers to help me out so please leave a comment if you wish to contribute code, css, icons etc.

Some Programming Notes

The application is written in PHP with a MySQL database and javascript for the frontend work. I have attempted to preserve clean separation of data and presentation. The backend talks only XML and XHTML, so it can be used as a webservice with the results being plugged into your client of choice. A very quick and dirty templating engine makes sure that there is no confusion between the core classes and the XML generating backend. A particular query can quite easily be switched between returning an XML document or an HTML files. Open Source - I do believe that this effort represents the worlds first open source carpooling engine (hear hear!). It's on sourceforge. To check out the code do:

• cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@patangcarpool.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/patangcarpool login
• cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@patangcarpool.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/patangcarpool co -P carpool

or browse the code at https://sourceforge.net/projects/patangcarpool/

JazzHead

This is a post announcing the release of JazzHead - A Music Screensaver for iTunes. It comes with the following features:

• displays album cover and song details
• downloads random artist images from the internet and presents them as a slideshow
• displays artist-related news
• provides one-click access to the artist and album's allmusic.com page

Here are some screenshots:
In shuffle mode, next five album covers are shown on the left, news below and internet images on the right
Showing artist page at allmusic.com Showing album page at allmusic.com

Download JazzHead
System Requirements: Works only with iTunes and requires Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0