K.Satchidanandan

Look at me walking to the gallows:

In ten minutes, my dreamles head

will be severed from my desireless body.

I have listened to my victim’s blood

scream for my love.

I have longed to kneel

to his family and friends,

longed to weep hugging

the mango trees on his courtyard,

to roll in that sand and ask for

mother earth’s pardon

Then I would return to

the half-eaten fruit and

the half-sung song,

to the half-built house

and the half-read book,

to the half- loved love and

the half- lived life.

I would cross the river

to be at the festival in the temple,

cross the hill to be

at the church for Christmas.

I would board the crowded bus

to go to town and tell my friends,

‘Look, I have come.’

I had longed to see my daughter

grow up into a free woman,

my son into a man who can weep.

I had more dreams than memories

like a flame-of-the-forest in summer

with more flowers than leaves.

I am no Sheharazade who can

postpone death telling tales.

The tree of tales has shed its leaves

To become  this gnarled tree of death.

They asked me if I had a last wish.

I didn’t tell them I wanted to be

a hare, its ears aloft on the meadow,

a squirrel talking from the jackfruit  tree,

a bird held on a rainbow,the river

of posterity and the spring wind.

The sweet they offered me was bitter , like death,

a bitterness with a cat’s eyes

that will survive the gallows.

Tell me law -givers,

tell me, judges of men,

don’t you regret this sentence

that renders even regret redundant?

What is the distance

from the hot logic of homicide

to the cold logic of hanging?

I leave the questions on the ever green earth

and  go along this worn passage

weary  with the blood

of the guity and the guiltless,

of murderers and martyrs.

Let none have to tread this path tomorrow.

Let there be

T-o-m-o-r-r-o-w.

( Translated from the Malayalam by the poet )

In most other countries, the definition of Criminal Contempt of Court is limited to anything that threatens to be a clear and present danger to the administration of justice. This business of “scandalising” and “lowering the authority” of the court is an absurd, dangerous form of censorship and an insult to our collective intelligence.

I suggest you read the full story as she writes in a clear and as usual sharp language how the judiciary has grown to such a position even to sent anyone asking tough questions to jail.

Defective by Design is running a
campaign encouraging Bono to take a stand on DRM will send a powerful
message.

Its your chance to be a prt of this campaign by signing the petition.
We have reached about 5000 signatures and we are looking at 10000. So
pass it on to your friends as well.

Dear Bono,

You have dedicated a major part of your life’s work to fighting for
good causes, bringing pressure to bear on the powerful and political
elite to effect positive change. In the same way that you have called
for action from world leaders, we now call upon you to look at the
facts surrounding Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and join us
in demanding an end to handcuffs on technology and culture.

Read the full petition and sign

Join orkut community Defective By Design and invite your friends.

SFD Banner outside of Divyasree Chambers, Bangalore

* BMS College of Engineering
* Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering
* Sir M Visweswaraiah Institute of Technology

In BMS the sessions wer handled by Aanjhan, me, Dilip, Srikanth and Dinesh. In DSCE Laxmi, Ramaprasad and Kanti handled sessions where as Moinak Ghosh, Prabhod and Saurabh from Sun Microsystems along with his other colleagues presented the day at MVIT.

I will write about my experience at BMS here. Lets wait for other folks’ scribbles.

First of all I would like to congratulate Netravathi B, Sharada M and their friends who helped us make this event a grand success. Hats off to you folks !

Also all the students and FSUG team who made the day a memorable one.

I woke up at 7.30 and started the day with SFD wishes to friends. The message was

“If we both exchange one apple, we both have ONE apple each, but if we exchange one good thought, we both have TWO good thoughts.”

-George Bernad Shaw

Share your thoughts for a Free Society NOW!

Celebrate Freedom, Spread the message,
Happy Software Freedom Day.

www.softwarefreedomday.org

I reached BMS College by 9 am and we started the event around 9 30 with Revolution OS and Aanjhan took over by 10.The auditorium was fully packed and it was about 350 students, even some of them were sitting on side steps, and many standing even after bringing some more extra chairs. We had really good interactive session where we clarified basic confusing terms like Free Software, Open Source Software, GNU/Linux, hacking. It was really great to see audience correctly answering some of these queries. We stressed the benefits of contributing to Free software and career opportunities. Srikanth explained the basic motivation behind the computer technological advancements, we are trying to reach as close as possible to the human bodies functionuing (memory, logic, recognition…).

House Full !!

Aanjhan in full josh

We had a rather boring session (should I say quite unwelcome session?) on SUSE Linux 10. It was a complete marketing presentation by one of the Novell folks where he kept playing some movies and talked how SUSE is superior and Novell is the reason for Microsoft to postpone Vista release. We thought it will be some technical presentation about cool features of Novell 10. He even said Debian is a company.

Except for this session it was awesome. We kept smiling at some of his claims. Like how can you ‘download’ windows application to ‘linux’ using mono. But we learned some positive lessons from that. See corporate eye ball trap by Atul (this not exactly the case here though, since SUSE is Free Software). But it gave the students a different perspective and some of the facts which we didn’t wanna tell them. Like our main motivation is to help students to learn and be part of such an amazing community, so some one had to do the marketing stuff. But I was happy with the fact that he took some time to spent with us I would like to thank him for participating in Software Freedom Day.

Srikanth during the BoF session

Anyway the moment he finished we announced BoF sessions for interested folks. About 60 people stayed back and we splitted into 4 groups and addressed their doubts and asked about their interest areas. Me and Dilip took charge of one group and we had a very interesting discussion. Other three groups were handled bu Aanjhan, Srikanth and Dinesh. We had to leave the hall only because they had to close the hall and we left the campus becuase it was already 1 30 and all of us were started feeling hungry.

tuxmaniac, me and dilpu

Me, Dilip, Aanjhan and Srikanth had lunch at angeethi and was back home by 4. It was a great experience we are excited to continue work with them. Stay tuned to bmslug.

Congrats again to Nethra and Sharada. Also to Ramaprasad who was with me from the beginning.

Update: Link to Atul’s blog about corporate eye-ball trap added. Now after reading that again today I felt so bad at the way the presentation was done.

I think it was even worse, because it was a community organised event and it got hijacked. The events which Atul talk about was organised with such motives from the beginning.

Update:
Srikanth has posted the album see here.

Update:

Some more blogs on the day

• Nethra
• Aanjhan
• Hiran
• Pramode CE

??? From Malayalam wikipedia

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The beautiful Vythiri

It was really a great chance to attend the National Service Scheme Camp organised at Vuthri by the juniors. Making the arena for another get together with the juniors who were always the embodiment of grt friendship.

The team

Rakesh, Kiren, Thomson, Sajeev and Dhanraj sir

We reached the camp site early morning on Saturday. This was my third NSS camp. I still remember the beautiful memories of my frist NSS camp which Pattambi’s team conducted. ( I would love to see someone writing about all days of the camp like this for this camp too)

Haridas entertaining the camp members — from Anakkampoyil camp

‘Special Group’

They showed us the results of many days hard work with enthusiasm and satisfaction. It gives you a lot of satiafaction when you know that you have made a difference to somebody’s life. Even to go to a hospital they had no transport available as the road was not motorable. Now they can avail transport.

/me having a look at the progress, Jayakumar sir is seen explaining

The people there prepared tapioca snacks for us.

Having a break

The finishing touch- Geo

After the work we had bath in the river near by. Then we had delicious lunch. After the hardowork the luch always is very tasty. We missed Kunchiramettan – he used to cook for all the camps, he could not come this time because he was not feeling well. He used to tell us the experiences of the previous camps. He was there at the time of Rajan [He was a student of REC Calicut and was (believed to be ) murdered by Police during the days of Emergency ]. Even now people know REC (now NIT) as Rajan’s college. We have our cultural festival Ragam named after him. Last time he told us about his experience with Rajan. Rajan was good actor and he was coming back from a perfomance with Kunchiramettan when poilice caught him. To juniors you missed Kunchiramettan this time.

Kunchiramettan at Anakkampoyil camp

We were preparing for the Camp Fire after lunch. The campfire is for my third time and it was wonderful each time. It was filled with Folk songs (original – by the camp members and other popular numbers) and film songs.

The camp fire — Prashob is seen in full swing

Camp fire

Folk song moment.

The Fire

After the campfire there was camp evaluation. Hey folks you did a wonderful job. Congratulations. There has to be suggestions for better camp next time. It is very necessary, otherwise you would feel complacent. Every time you should think how to make the next one better. We also gone through this phase. Take the suggestions to make the next camp even a better one.

Me at the worksite

We were in a confusion whether we should stay for the trekking too. But we decided to go for trekking. We climbed the Chembara peak, the second highest peak after Anamudi. It was a wonderful experience [Still the wound I got from a leech bite not cured ]. We left the campsite by 9 and reached the top by 11.30.

For more photos see the nss website
I’ll update the trekking photos after I’m back from X mass holidays.

Merry Christmass and Happy New Year to all.

The members of the “Bloggers of Bangalore” community would like to bring to the attention of the media and society at large, certain unfair and intimidatory actions undertaken by the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) against members of the Indian blogging community.

In June 2005, JAM, a popular youth magazine published out of Mumbai, ran a story on IIPM titled ‘The Truth about IIPM’s Tall Claims” pointing out blatant exaggerations in the institute’s claims about infrastructure, courses, affiliations and placements. For instance, the magazine article pointed out how IIPM continues to use certain rankings conferred upon it AFTER those rankings have been withdrawn by the bodies conferring them.

The magazine ran an ethically researched investigative story on IIPM, revealing what was a marketing fraud by the college.

Alongside, the editor of JAM magazine and a former student of Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad, who is also a blogger, published the same on her personal blog. In August 2005, blogger Gaurav Sabnis, another Mumbai-based blogger, posted about this on his own blog, linking to JAM’s original story. Soon after this, he received an e-mail from the IIPM legal department threatening to sue him for a huge sum of money unless he withdrew his comments. Simultaneously, he was also pressurised by IIPM through his employers, a global hardware manufacturer. Rather than put his employers in a tight spot, Sabnis decided to quit his job. Meanwhile, Varna Sriraman also got a mail from IIPM threatning legal and police action

This is a story that has been carried by several media organisations
such as the
Hindustan Times:

Indian Express:

DNA:

NDTV:

Business Standard: and

MSNBC:

and has created a furore in the blogosphere in India as well as internationally. The strength of blogging as a force to reckon with has previously been seen in the co-ordination or relief efforts in the Tsunami crisis and the Mumbai rains at Mumbai Help and Cloudburst Mumbai .

For detailed information on the bloggers vs IIPM issue, please visit http://www.desipundit.com for chronological updates on the controversy.

The purpose of this petition is to express solidarity with the bloggers who have suffered threats and abuse at the hands of IIPM and also to draw attention to the original issues at the heart of the JAM story on IIPM.

If you believe that journalists and the media should be free to inform the public of false advertisements, which directly or indirectly affects their lives;

If you believe education should not be reduced to a marketable commodity;

If you believe that blogging is a powerful supplement to traditional media;

If you believe that bloggers should be entitled to individual opinions as also their own online space for airing and discussing these opinions;

If you believe in standing up for your rights; as an active member of society, as a blogger, as a citizen with the right to know

Please show your support to this cause, by going to the following website:

http://www.petitiononline.com/blogbang, and adding your signature. Also, if you’re a blogger, please carry this article on your blog. Thirdly, do pass this e-mail around to all your contacts.

The bloggers of bangalore are also going to stage a silent, sit-in demonstration on Monday, the 24th of October, in front of IIPM, Bangalore, to express their support to this cause. If you think the right to express our opinions is one of our fundamental, inalienable rights, do inform as many people as you can about this proposed demonstration.

Sincerely,

The Bloggers of Bangalore

Where the mind is without fear
And the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up
Into fragments by narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

Now we are trying to improve ourselves so that we can have a better impact on the audience. It was our alpha edition and so it had many bugs, we didn’t have any idea what to expect. But I think this experience gave us a better picture and will help us (hopefully) in our next ventures.

All this started with Thejesh’s mail in fsf-friends mailing list enquiring about any plans for Software Freedom Day. We discussed many possible events in August blugmeet. But nothing materialised since we were very late and many colleges had exmas. We got positive reply from Nirmal Thacker of BMS College and it took us till the week before the seminar to confirm the date. Kudos to Nirmal and team to make it a grand success.

We met of Thurday before talk to plan the event and the Alumnii of BMS told us not to expect more than 60 and the turn up was above our expectations. We plan to continue our efforts in other campuses also (we are planning events in MSRIT and PESIT). We are preaparing a FAQ to answer those ‘Frequesntly Asked Questions’ like ‘How do I make money from FOSS ?’ ‘Why do we need to struggle with galde when we can use Visual Studio easily ?’ … If you have some question about FOSS, then update the FAQ and if you got answer to some of these questions then do post it too. Let’s better prepared next time.

Update: The slides are available here pdf
ppt
(Brinkster does not recognise sxi).

1. Go on AIR on Radio City 91 FM on Software Freedom Day
2. Spread the word about the day through blogs and articles on News Papers

We had earlier thought of going to colleges and discuss about the importance of software freedom and advantages of using FOSS, but unfortunately we could not go forward with it on SFD since most of the colleges we contacted were having exams (My college NITC is having internal exams from 5th and Thejesh’s college BTL is also having internal exams and Thejesh was the only original Bangaloreans came for the meet). But we have not chucked out the plan completely. We plan to take up this issue after the SFD.

3. Meet VC of VTU and submit the petition (see VTU Floss Campaign for more details )

Another topic we discussed was to bring out a live CD with all the available educational tools (especially one for VTU). The ambitious project aims to develop a customised GNU slash Linux distro for Educational institutions customised for India ( The problem we face with the current aproach is discussed earlier – see this).

We discussed the problems facing for the adoption of FOSS tools in colleges (The main issue is that most care about only the marks and nobody is interested to try out something new and the reluctance of teachers to accept a new tool even makes the matters worse). Gopal V descibed how some of his friends who chose Scilab in Mechanical lab got less marks than those who used Matlab. Now we want to make sure people who chose FOSS would succed. So we plan to hack on Octave to make it work like Matlab (It is very similar but many don’t want to learn something new). So as the first step we plan to have a session by someone who actually use Octave for his work (In IITs they use Ocatve) and understand the issues and extend if necessary to suit to Indian circumstance, which include preparing tutorials to suit the Indian Curriculum needs.

Kamat sugeested designing wallpapers and Screen savers describing software freedom and its importance (He is a good artist and showed us many images designed in gimp for gnome artwork – Most are available from Gnome Art)

I had EduMorphix CD (live CD cum Install CD prepared for use in High Schools in Kerala as the curriculum includes a chice between Windows and GNU slash Linux) with me and we tried it on Kanti’s laptop. We also had a quick view of GNU slash Hurd live CD too. It was followed by a brief discussion on Monolithic and microkernel. Gopal V explained that the concept of everything is a file in Unix is taken to a higher level in GNU slash Hurd — everything is a pipe (See my seminar on GNU slash Hurd )

We were ready to leave by 5.30 with a focused aim for SFD – be on AIR

Then we discussed about mono and dotGNU (the foss competeters for Free Implementation to Microsoft’s .NET technology). It was like ‘Straight from the horse’s mouth’ as Goplal V described about internals of dotGNU — He is a dotGNU core developer for last 4 years.

Gopal V ported dotGNU portable .NET to Encore simputer during Linux Bangalore 2004. Quote from Atul Chitnis - The conference Organiser.

”I threw the challenge as a joke, the bet being a cup of coffee. Gopal borrowed a PC at the conference, and finally an Encore Simputer, and came to me on the third day, saying that I now owed him a cup of coffee. It took a few seconds before the enormity of that statement hit me.”

Then we dispersed and I walked with Gopal V from Woody’s. We discussed about dotGNU and Free Software and a lot on the way. I went to his home and then we went to Landmark in Forum where he purchased some books and I came back to BTM drenched fully in Rain. I walked a lot and the discussion was so interesting that I didn’t know I was walking this far ! From Jayanagr to Forum through Tavarakere and back to BTM near water tank. I was looking for the expansion of BTM for all the time since I started my stay in BTM and now Gopal V told me that BTM stands for Bommanahalli – Tavarakare – Madivala as it was formed by taking parts from each of these.

I came back home with happy heart. It was a great day.

Update: Early in the mornig (6.30) I was up and went to ground to play football (we ie, me, VR, Kaustup and Ganjan played the day before for the first time). But no one turned up so I went to my friends ‘ home near Madivala lake in BTM 2nd stage. I had breakfast there and at 10 we went for boating in Madivala lake. It was really a good experience to see Pelicans very near [The species seen in Madival lake is Spot-Billed Pelican]. It is an awesome scene to watch pelicans land in water, like an aeroplane landing.

Madivala lake. location: 29th main, tankshow road, ii stage, btm layout. size: 114.16 hectare. total wetland area 24.74 acre. department it comes under: karnataka forest department. history: the madivala lake was built by the cholas nearly 300 years ago. it is said to have been built overnight. it got its name (which means washerman) because the lake used to be primarily used by the washermen population that lived around it. still the water was supposed to have been so clean that people would travel several miles to take drinking water from it.