Thursday, September 21, 2006

Way To Go!

I really appreciate what Mr. Anand Kumar is doing. This is what India needs on a much larger scale if she wants to become a knowledge super power.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

1857 Mutiny

I haven't been following the news lately, but this is an interesting article on 1857 mutiny and its research.

It is described as "war of religion" rather than independence movement. I remember from the books, that the primary cause of revolt was indeed the religion with sepoys being forced to do certain things their religion prohibited (primarily, the meat). Definitely, in the subcontinent, religion was a very strong motivating and remains so to this date as observed in day-to-day news articles. It could very well be that some souls used religion to rally support for the independence cause like the way taliban uses it.

Archives are one way to look at the history and predicting the alternate course is next to impossible. Things might have different but how much? Would we have had another "Asoka" instead of "Bose"?

I would think that this revolt would have definitely happened if not in 1857 than few years later. It was a very socialist India then and hurting people from your neighbourhood definitely causes discontent among people. Another cause would have been the uprooting of village micro-economics by opium production policies of British Empire. That had led to unemployment (or rather ungainful employment or forced labour) which would have fuelled the revolt.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Intel Laptop Gaming Technical Development Kit

This is a nice toolkit to modify the games. I always wish if my civilization III can show me the status so that I can save the game before the laptop starts to hibernate!