September 2006

As I was coming out of blogcamp I saw fire in the slum just outside the Tidel park. People were crowding near the place. Passerbys stopped over to have a look. I could see some of the slum dwellers desperately trying to put off the fire. I shamelessly took out my mobile and started filming the whole event. While filming a fire suddenly popped up and we were all taken back, a cylinder burst perhaps. I consider myself guilty of actually trying to capture the whole event and not contributing anything to the desperate slum dwellers who were seeing their paradise being taken away from them by the fire.

I have been using Firefox for over an year now but now planning to shift to Flock. Well the reasons, here they are:

1. RAM usage. Occasionally the RAM usage shoots up to more than 200 MB and then my whole system collapses. I have heard that they plan to improve this in the new version 2.0 so lets wait and see but I am not very hopeful

2. Extensions. Whenever I upgrade my Firefox version I have compatibility problems. Many of my extensions don’t work, in spite of using Nightly Tester Tool. So I have to change the settings again and again.

People usually curse Laloo for the jungle raj in Bihar for 15 years of unopposed rule. True, under him Bihar was retrograded to one of the least developed states in India. There was nothing called governance. The law and order situation was pathetic. Murder, dacioti, rape, corruption….you name it, they were all there in Bihar. He single handedly transformed the fate of then Janta party which later broke in Rashtriya Janta Dal, led by Laloo, and the other faction led by Ram Vilas Paswan. Laloo Prasad Yadav was involved in many scams and he didn’t even leave the fodder of poor animals. Bihar became a place to make money by few elitist. The economic gap widened.There was no investment in the area because of demands from the local mafia. There was turmoil all around. People were looking at opportunities to leave the state and settle down in elsewhere. There was exodus of students after school for better education. States like Karnataka and Maharashtra played host to them and that’s the reason you find Bihrai students in myriad in many localities of Delhi like Mukherjee Nagar. A ‘”student from outside” state became synonymous with a “Bihari student”. So who were the beneficiaries? The private colleges in Karnataka and our good old Bokaro (oops Dhanbad) Alleppy express (Well if you are unaware of this train then you better brush up your GK. This is the only train that connects many places in Bihar, and now Jharkhand, to southern India. It crosses 5 states and the total run time is 60 hours! This express train stops at every damn place which has a railway platform or no platform). This exodus of students led to brain drain and also lost of huge revenue that could have been generated if they would have stayed back. But there is a dearth of professional colleges in the state and all the existing ones are overburdened with children and grandchildren of Bihari Babus. BIT Mesra, Ranchi (perhaps the only engineering college of repute) has the dubious image of having progenies of ministers, political leaders and people with influence. I dare not narrate those stories where such students were involved because by doing that I will put the life of my family members in danger, well if those babus are already exposed to the world of blogging :P.