Today is the 104th birth anniversary of Sardar Bhagat Singh Shaheed – a man who truly became a legend in his own lifetime. His story must be familiar to almost all of you. Many of you will also remember his crime – shooting a police officer in response to the “lathi charge” on a gathering that resulted in the death of Punjab Kesri, Lala Lajpat Rai. But few may know that patriotism and participation in the freedom struggle ran in the family. His uncles as well as his father were members …

..or The Great Joke that is Indian Media – Part XVI !
Please have a look at the two images below…They refer to news-reports of certain politicians implicated in a crime. They are both from the same newspaper and are fairly recent (one from yesterday; another from a few months back). Notice anything strange?

Source: Missing woman: Rajasthan Minister is accused of her murder and rape

Source: CBI arrests Punjab BJP MLA for graft, names minister too
I would like to think that the curious omission of the name of the political party to which …

Dear All: I finally managed to upload the video of my talk and Q&A at IIM-Indore on 1st Sept ’11…Here is the entire playlist (also below):

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These are my favourites of the lot:

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Interestingly, in an Op-Ed for Pioneer written a few days later, Shashi Shekhar made a point very similar to the one I mentioned in the Open Government, Information and RTI clip (emphasis added):
Hard questions need to be asked on why the focus of the RTI Act was not on creating an open Government where information was freely available, thus …

Dear friends, some of you will remember the conversation I had a few days back with the proud parents of Captain Saurabh Kalia, Kargil’s first war hero – who has been all but forgotten by the “official” media and the government machinery. I sent an email to Dr Kalia after the call requesting details of his efforts to get justice and offering whatever little help I can..In response, I received this very moving email written by him. I sought his permission to reproduce it on the blog. He kindly agreed…The …

This post was prompted by a tweet from Ashik earlier this week.  He wrote:
Who has paid money for this? Congress party or Sonia/Manmohan? Isnt this free publicity by taxpayers money?

Before we go any further, here’s a pop-quiz: Can you guess the number of schemes, programmes and institutions in India named after the Nehru-Gandhi family? 100? Wrong. 200? Wrong? 300? Wrong. 400? Now you are getting close…As of 2009, the number stood at 450+. I have no doubt that it must have increased since then.
Of course, we are not just talking …

Aryabhata discussed the concept of sine in his work by the name of ardha-jya. Literally, it means ”half-chord“. For simplicity, people started calling it jya. When Arabic writers translated his works from Sanskrit into Arabic, they referred it as jiba.
However, in Arabic writings, vowels are omitted, and it was abbreviated as jb.

Later writers substituted it with jiab, meaning “cove” or “bay” (in Arabic, jiba is a meaningless word).
Later in the 12th century, when Gherardo of Cremona translated these writings from Arabic into Latin, he replaced the Arabic jiab with its Latin counterpart, sinus, which means “cove” …