Dr. Abdul Kalam's Letter to Every Indian

Dr. Abdul Kalam's Letter to Every Indian



Why is the media here so negative?

\Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements?
We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?
We are the first in milk production.
We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.
We are the second largest producer of wheat.
We are the second largest producer of rice.

Look at Dr. Sudarshan , he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.

I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.. Why are we so NEGATIVE? Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign T.Vs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology.

Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance? I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is. She replied: I want to live in a developed India . For her, you and I will have to build this developed India . You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation.


Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengeance.
Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read; otherwise, choice is yours..

YOU say that our government is inefficient.


YOU say that our laws are too old.


YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage.


YOU say that the phones don't work, the railways are a joke. The airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination.


YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits.


YOU say, say and say. What do YOU do about it?

Take a person on his way to Singapore . Give him a name - 'YOURS'. Give him a face - 'YOURS'. YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best. In Singapore you don't throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores. YOU are as proud of their Underground links as they are.. You pay $5 (approx. Rs. 60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or Pedder Road) between 5 PM and 8 PM. YOU come back to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity… In Singapore you don't say anything, DO YOU? YOU wouldn't dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai .. YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah.

YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds (Rs.650) a month to, 'see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else.'YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, 'Jaanta hai main kaun hoon (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so's son. Take your two bucks and get lost.' YOU wouldn't chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand ..



Why don't YOU spit Paan on the streets of Tokyo ? Why don't YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston ??? We are still talking of the same YOU. YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India ?

In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan ..

Will the Indian citizen do that here?' He's right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility.
We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick a up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms.



We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity.
This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public.

When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women, dowry, girl child! and others, we make loud drawing room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? 'It's the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons' rights to a dowry.' So who's going to change the system?



What does a system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbours, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr.Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away.



Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to

America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England . When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money.

ASK WHAT WE CAN DO FOR INDIA AND DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE TO MAKE INDIA WHAT AMERICA AND OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES ARE TODAY'

Lets do what India needs from us.

Rise of Women In India..

Its official - In India, its 9th March and not 8th - Women's Day and it took 14 years for Indian politicians  (read men) to rise above petty things and give more rights to women in the highest office in India- the Parliament and also in the state assemblies..

There are several tired old jokes about how women don’t know what they want. Yaaaawwwn! Really??!!! But one thing’s for sure — women definitely know what they don’t want and the list can be pretty long, ranging from the trivial and the mundane to the serious. What women know for sure is that they resent the assumption that any ‘want’ or ‘don’t want’ list has to be about men as if that is all there is to life. And yes, there are going to be howls of protest from women who might not necessarily agree with the entries on this list. But then again, we can always agree to disagree, can’t we? It’s a much more civilised manner of sorting out differences than lunging for shirt collars and settling issues with fisticuffs like some others we know..

DON’T THINK PINK

There is the irritating assumption that marketers make — that any technology or gadget, if targeted at women, will first have to be colour-coded even before its functions are customised to suit the specific demands women might have. So, laptops for women have to be baby pink or red; the same goes for cell phones, scooters and cars too. Sure, there must be some women who have a thing for being girlie, but surely it’s moronic to club all women with their individual preferences into one category. In short, women definitely don’t want to be colour-coded and slotted in the pink section.

UNIVERSAL MS

It is seriously annoying to find men are known by the universal Mr — totally neutral towards their marital status — while a woman has to specify whether she is a Ms — in which case she is supposedly unmarried — or Mrs, which indicates that she is married. How old fashioned! Let’s agree to stick to Mr and Ms irrespective of marital status, shall we? It is catching on and things are changing, but not quite fast enough. Women don’t want to be the missus anymore.

HELLO, WHERE’S MY MOTHER IN THIS?

On all official forms, government and otherwise, a person’s identity is established by the ubiquitous D/O or W/O, decoded as daughter of and wife of. If it is D/O, then it is automatically assumed you will fill in your father’s name. Women don’t want that to be the default choice. Many would like to name their mother in the D/O option and that ought to be both legal and socially acceptable. After all, a woman is the daughter of both the mother and the father. The same option — of naming one’s mother on documents — should be available to men too. Also, can men have an option of saying H/O, meaning husband of, equivalent to the W/O? If women can be identified as the wife of someone, surely the converse should be just as acceptable.

FOOTLOOSE, WEAPONS-FREE

Women don’t want to have to travel with an arsenal of weapons or have to make a hundred enquiries before making travel plans to even the most ordinary of places. Why can’t it be safe for women to travel without them, and their entire family, going into a tizzy about the ‘security and safety’ arrangements? It is almost as bad as the ‘security considerations’ that constantly hamper the itinerary of our netas and cause a public nuisance.

NO-S FOR NEWS

Women don’t want sections of magazines, newspapers or television time apportioned and slotted as ‘women’s sections’. You know what? We are not myopic individuals interested only in news that is supposedly of special interest to us. We are smart, thinking individuals with varied interests and are conversant with the ways of the world. We read and watch everything that is put out there for general consumption. And guess what? Diet plans, recipes, fashion and grooming columns, etc are things that men should be and are interested in as well; so why confine them to the so-called women’s sections?

PULL YOUR WEIGHT, MATE

Help is such a loaded four-letter word. So, we don’t want to hear another word about how men should ‘help out’ at home. Hello! Just who are they doing a favour by ‘helping’ out with household work, whether it is running errands, cleaning up or being useful in the kitchen? Let’s call it what it really is: pulling one’s own weight. In a shared living space, no one ‘helps out’ or does anyone favours. One just does one’s fair share of work. And yes, that includes doing the dishes and supervising domestic helps.

SPOIL US, PLEASE

Hasn’t the world figured out by now that women want it all? So don’t ask us, for the seven hundred trillionth time, how we can fly the feminist flag and also want chivalry. For centuries, one half of the world has been denied most rights that the other took for granted. Even today, though life is comparatively better for women, we still have to keep fighting for basic freedoms and opportunities. We want to live life on our terms. That includes getting the space to be our own selves as well as being attended upon.

CLAWS IN, PAWS OFF

“Women ask for trouble …”. That’s a line we don’t ever want to hear again. Every time there is an instance of rape or sexual harassment (eve teasing is a word that should be banned once and for all), you can be sure that there is some patronising pundit — be it the police, self-appointed custodians of social mores and morality, or a politician — who’ll say that the woman invited trouble because of the way she was dressed. Well, let’s get this straight: we will wear what we want. We don’t pounce on men who are ‘skimpily clad’ and grope them over, do we? So keep your paws to yourself and learn to be civilised.

WE ARE; THEREFORE, YOU SHUT UP

Just who should decide what constitutes ‘pretty’, ‘sexy’, ‘ugly’, ‘sensuous’ or any other category that women are constantly slotted into? We don’t want to be held up to arbitrary beauty standards. Let us just be who we are; there’s no reason why we should be sized up and be pressurised to measure up. My life, my looks. If you don’t like what you see, look the other way.

LOOK MA, YOU ARE FREE

Hum sab ke paas Ma hai. And there is no one gold standard against which we can weigh how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ a mother is. We venerate our mothers but forget that they are human too, with their own needs and wants, feet of clay and foibles. If we really want to honour our mothers, and give them their due, how about stopping guilt-tripping them by constantly discussing — in public and private — what good mothers should do and be like?

 

Source: Indiatimes.com

Gendercide- The war on baby girls

IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.


Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $ 12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do?

For millions of couples, the answer is: abort the daughter, try for a son. In China and northern India more than 120 boys are being born for every 100 girls. Nature dictates that slightly more males are born than females to offset boys’ greater susceptibility to infant disease. But nothing on this scale.

For those who oppose abortion, this is mass murder. For those such as this newspaper, who think abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” (to use Bill Clinton’s phrase), a lot depends on the circumstances, but the cumulative consequence for societies of such individual actions is catastrophic. China alone stands to have as many unmarried young men—“bare branches”, as they are known—as the entire population of young men in America. In any country rootless young males spell trouble; in Asian societies, where marriage and children are the recognised routes into society, single men are almost like outlaws. Crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates are all rising and will rise further as the lopsided generations reach their maturity.
It is no exaggeration to call this gendercide. Women are missing in their millions—aborted, killed, neglected to death. In 1990 an Indian economist, Amartya Sen, put the number at 100m; the toll is higher now. The crumb of comfort is that countries can mitigate the hurt, and that one, South Korea, has shown the worst can be avoided. Others need to learn from it if they are to stop the carnage.

The dearth and death of little sisters

Most people know China and northern India have unnaturally large numbers of boys. But few appreciate how bad the problem is, or that it is rising. In China the imbalance between the sexes was 108 boys to 100 girls for the generation born in the late 1980s; for the generation of the early 2000s, it was 124 to 100. In some Chinese provinces the ratio is an unprecedented 130 to 100. The destruction is worst in China but has spread far beyond. Other East Asian countries, including Taiwan and Singapore, former communist states in the western Balkans and the Caucasus, and even sections of America’s population (Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, for example): all these have distorted sex ratios. Gendercide exists on almost every continent. It affects rich and poor; educated and illiterate; Hindu, Muslim, Confucian and Christian alike.

Wealth does not stop it. Taiwan and Singapore have open, rich economies. Within China and India the areas with the worst sex ratios are the richest, best-educated ones. And China’s one-child policy can only be part of the problem, given that so many other countries are affected.

In fact the destruction of baby girls is a product of three forces: the ancient preference for sons; a modern desire for smaller families; and ultrasound scanning and other technologies that identify the sex of a fetus. In societies where four or six children were common, a boy would almost certainly come along eventually; son preference did not need to exist at the expense of daughters. But now couples want two children—or, as in China, are allowed only one—they will sacrifice unborn daughters to their pursuit of a son. That is why sex ratios are most distorted in the modern, open parts of China and India. It is also why ratios are more skewed after the first child: parents may accept a daughter first time round but will do anything to ensure their next—and probably last—child is a boy. The boy-girl ratio is above 200 for a third child in some places.

How to stop half the sky crashing down

Baby girls are thus victims of a malign combination of ancient prejudice and modern preferences for small families. Only one country has managed to change this pattern. In the 1990s South Korea had a sex ratio almost as skewed as China’s. Now, it is heading towards normality. It has achieved this not deliberately, but because the culture changed. Female education, anti-discrimination suits and equal-rights rulings made son preference seem old-fashioned and unnecessary. The forces of modernity first exacerbated prejudice—then overwhelmed it.

But this happened when South Korea was rich. If China or India—with incomes one-quarter and one-tenth
Korea’s levels—wait until they are as wealthy, many generations will pass. To speed up change, they need to take actions that are in their own interests anyway. Most obviously China should scrap the one-child policy. The country’s leaders will resist this because they fear population growth; they also dismiss Western concerns about human rights. But the one-child limit is no longer needed to reduce fertility (if it ever was: other East Asian countries reduced the pressure on the population as much as China). And it massively distorts the country’s sex ratio, with devastating results. President Hu Jintao says that creating “a harmonious society” is his guiding principle; it cannot be achieved while a policy so profoundly perverts family life.

And all countries need to raise the value of girls. They should encourage female education; abolish laws and customs that prevent daughters inheriting property; make examples of hospitals and clinics with impossible sex ratios; get women engaged in public life—using everything from television newsreaders to women traffic police. Mao Zedong said “women hold up half the sky.” The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky crashing down.
 
Source: The Economist

Save the World... Its Your Home..

 

  

 

 

  

 

got this story on a mail..
Denmark is a big shame.

The sea is stained in red and it’s not because of the climate effects of nature.

It's because of the cruelty that the human beings (civilised human) kill hundreds of the famous and intelligent Calderon dolphins.

This happens every year in Feroe iland in Denmark . In this slaughter the main participants are young teens. WHY?
To show that they are adults and mature.... BULLLLsh

In this big celebration, nothing is missing for the fun. Everyone is participating in one way or the other, killing or looking at the cruelty “supporting like a spectator”

Is it necessary to mention that the dolphin calderon, like all the other species of dolphins, it’s near instinction and they get near men to play and interact. In a way of PURE friendship

They don’t die instantly; they are cut 1, 2 or 3 times with thick hocks. And at that time the dolphins produce a grim extremely compatible with the cry of a new born child.

But he suffers and there’s no compassion till this sweet being slowly dies in its own blood

Its enough! We will send this mail until this email arrives in any association defending the animals, we won’t only read.

Take care of the world, it is your home!

Save Our Tigers..

Our national animal is fighting for its life.
From around 40,000 at the turn of the last century, there are just 1411 tigers left in India.
If we don’t act now, we could lose this part of our heritage forever.
Speak up, blog, share the concern, stay informed… Every little bit helps.

One of the story of one of the wars..

Jagdish is a daughter of Harnam Singh - a freedom fighter of India who braved the bullets at Jallianwala Bagh and came out alive after lying buried under a heap of bodies for 3 days. Her husband was a civil engineer in the Indian Army. During the 1984 riots, she lost her husband, her three brothers and her son was burnt alive before her. She took him in her arms and begged the blood-thirsty mob to stop jeering and give her some water to put in his mouth. No heart melted. Since then, she's shifted to the city of Amritsar.

                                                                        “On November 2, a day after my son and my husband were killed and policemen refused to file even a complaint, a well-wisher informed me that ‘MP Sahib is holding a meeting in nearby Manglapuri’ and that I could take his help to get a police complaint filed. When I reached there, I heard Sajjan Kumar saying "EK BHI SIKH BACHNA NAHI CHAIYE..JO HINDU BHI SIKH KO CHUPAYEGA, USKA BHI GHAR JALA DO. I rushed back without meeting him” , she said. Till this day, she added, she is trying to fathom why the entire Sikh community was attacked when just two sikhs shot the then Indian PM, Indira Gandhi. (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/The-mob-jeered-I-begged-but-no-heart-melted/articleshow/5415055.cms)

Twenty-five years have passed and the people of that fury mob are still free. Her question remains unanswered yet each one of us know the answer in our heart. Thousands of such stories were penned with blood during the anti-sikh riots of 1984. When on earth will humans understand that peace, love, justice, revenge and related things can't be achieved with war?? Nothing except the war is real. The wounds of wars can never be healed for they are absolute. Though she got the compensation, but was it reparable?? Well, call it fate or injustice or just another war story, the fact is that the wife of an Indian soldier and the daughter of an Indian freedom fighter got in reward, her son being murdered in front of  her eyes and the death of her husband and her three brothers. All this done by fellow Indians in the name of the monster called "religion".

Sunitha Krishnan fights sex slavery

Sunitha Krishnan is galvanizing India’s battle against sexual slavery by uniting government, corporations and NGOs to end human trafficking. Sunitha Krishnan has dedicated her life to rescuing women and children from sex slavery, a multimilion-dollar global market.Each year, some two million women and children, many younger than 10 years old, are bought and sold around the globe. Impassioned by the silence surrounding the sex-trafficking epidemic, Sunitha Krishnan co-founded Prajwala, or "eternal flame," a group in Hyderabad that rescues women from brothels and educates their children to prevent second-generation prostitution

"The sense that thousands and millions of children and young people are being sexually violated and that there’s this huge silence about it around me angers me. My biggest challenge while rescuing these people is our civil society, its you and me. Its very fashionable to talk about human trafficking, its very nice for discussions and making documentaries. Its not nice for us to employ them in our homes and factories. Its not nice for our children to study with their children. Thats my biggest challenge. They need your compassion, your empathy and above all they need your acceptance in society. Can you break your culture of silence??. Can u encompass these people and accept them, not as philanthropy, not as charity but as human beings."

Sunitha Krishnan

How many women do we think are prostitutes because this was their dream? How is there "consent" if you are being forced to be a prostitute due to lack of other choices or because you are being held in that position through force? This article is about the worst form of human riots violation.. violent than terrorism, violent than riots and violent than even rape. The third largest organized crime.. a $ 10 billion industry..a modern day slavery.. I'm talking about the heinous crime of sex slavery. I would like to tell you about a story of three children, i came across on internet..

Pranitha's mother was a women in prostitution. She got infected with HIV. During the last stages of AIDS, when she couldn't prostitute, she sold her daughter, a four year old girl to a broker. Later she was found raped by three men. Shaheen, a three year old girl was found on a railway track with her intestines coming out of her body, she too was ill fated and died later on. Reports said that she was used by almost hundred men. Anjali too had a similar story which i feel is understandable as of now. She was 5 when she died. Hundreds and thousands of children, in India and across the world are sold into sexual slavery. but thats not the only purpose for which human beings are sold for. They are sold in the name of organ trade, forced labour, camel jockeying etc.. The commercial sexual exploitation of humans has been here since centuries. What's the worst part of this crime is that the victims of such crimes are not accepted as a part of society. Most of them come from poor families who are born victims of the worst form of violence - Poverty, as said by Mahatma Gandhi. If you are an indian, or have been living in india for a while, u might be aware of the attitude of society towards rape victims. The actual rape is only the beginning of the victims' ordeal. In many cases, (mostly in backward regionsof the country, though not always) they become outcasts, with little or no chance at getting a decent life. Many end up becoming sex workers