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So we had a Bharat band. The band word itself sounds strange, considering that it means that everything stops. And it's so strange that the word which was used by our freedom fighters is used for a purpose which the people doing it do not even understand. This is not about a particular political party. It is a general phenomena, which repeats itself in the same way and the actors are people in power and people want to be in power.

So in the band, what we closed? We closed schools so the children could not study. We closed the shops and business so that people can not do day to day chorus. Who knows this might just stop us from achieving double digit growth. We stopped buses and trains so that people cannot reach to their destinations. The sick could not reach to Doctors. Wow, what an achievement.

And what was not closed, in spite of bandh. Corruption still went as it was yesterday. In fact got a full day to do deals. The rogues elements got their chance to destroy the public and private property. The small time politicians and big time also could show that how much they are important. Unfortunately their importance is reflected by stopping and destroying and not by creating and generating.

Each band is camouflaged behind a noble cause. Sometimes it is against fuel price hike and sometimes it's against some other issues. But all the times, a commonality is that the political parties resort to such act when they are going through identity crisis. It is more of a Page 3 politics.

If one is really concerned about the issues, than come up with alternatives to resolve those issues. I am sure, the people sitting in political parties are of very high caliber. There is never any doubt about that. But cannot they thing of better ways to solve the problem, rather than harassing the common man.

If still one thinks, band is a good idea than please for a moment think about that chaiwala or the construction labour, whose daily dinner depends on Bharat running as usual. It may not impact you, but it impacts most of the people and in a very bad way.

Why not have a Bharat khula, always and everytime and than find the solutions in that context.

Jai Ho !!!

If one thing that has troubled the world more after the religious fanatics, it is the concept of nationhood. Please do not take me wrong as I love my country but I have trouble, when it starts getting into the realm of hating the other country because they are not we. Amazing it is that no god or natural force has drawn those lines as we see in maps and globes built by human, but it in in grained in our mind by the academic systems. No fault of them, they are designed to do this. We have boundaries between India and Pakistan, US and Mexico, Germany and France and for that matter every country doing a boundary with other country. Who built those boundaries. We human so that we can divide ourselves and fight among ourselves. It's amazing. How innovative. A tiger, raccoon, elephant or for that matter any animal, bird or fish wants to go from one country to another they can just walk or fly or swim through. No passport, visa, immigration or customs. And what we human have to do. We have to justify that we are good humans so are eligible for passport, visa and be allowed at immigration center. Funny that we are the supposedly mosts advance among the living species and yet we could not develop a model to trust each other.

If one meet the people on street in any country, they are same and simple everywhere. Trying to meet everyday struggle in their life. So what went wrong that as we progressed the system around us became more unforgiving and suspicious. In software world, their is a parlance called Design by Configuration. What it means that you design the system considering the default behavior most of the time. Further to simplify, it means design for a behavior which is expected by most. Unfortunately all our systems are built around the notion that a person by default is bad and is a crook. And so everyone is looked from the same lens.

Is there an alternative arrangement possible. This is difficult at the moment as it has been ingrained deeply in our psyche. Especially rich nations would be more protective about themselves though many of them became rich at the cost of others. We need to change the thinking with a paradigm shift, than only it's going to be possible. I understand that local economies need to be saved and it requires some amount of protectionism. But beyond economics their are many simple things of life. The people just want to meet each other. Cannot we as the most advanced animal species do this and figure out a way.

So we are self congratulating ourselves because we reached to a judgement which was so obvious for last one and half year. We have spent crores of rupees in running the prison for Kasab and than spent horrendous amount of money in bringing a judgement which could have been done with some simpler means on 26th Dec. also. I have full respect (and not sympathy) to the people who have lost life or had been affected because of 26th Dec and because of what Mr. Kasab and his fellows did. But I think as a society we need to answer that is it justified to do such a lengthy process to achieve something which was so obvious all along. And unfortunately we have deployed some of the best brains of judiciary and of other government departments to achieve that.

The more bigger question is what we achieve with this exercise. Mr. Kasab is just a small fruit of a venomous tree. The tree is still there somewhere creating and spitting more such fruits probably with more vigor. If we have to put effort, than let's put in getting permanent solutions to this. We need to uproot those trees and make them dysfunctional. These self fulfilling rituals is not going to help us. And somewhere there lies the solution to naxalism also. It's a craft to debate philosphically in court rooms and parliament floors but it's more important to understand why so many youths are turning to extremism. It's not a question of any specific country but a broader question which has to be answered in a more broader context.
Let's not celebrate for what we have achieved, which was obvious. Let's try to achieve what we have to really achieve. Let the peace prevail in every mind and propagates to every heart.

Increase traffic to site is the mantra of success in the web. The more traffic comes to the site, the greater is the monetization capability. It's also is a big business at the moment. But is it easy to increase the traffic to a site? I thought so and I tried too many things, but I would say that it is still the black art for me.

I launched this site almost 10 months ago and the earning was not the purpose. As I was doing workshops and trainings, I found it a easy way to share the things online. All the tutorials including videos was loaded on the site. They say curiosity kills the cat and somehow I got initiated to all the adsense and analytics business. It started with some trickling pennies and it became a self sustaining hullucination. Though I learnt also a lot on the way, but I would say that it's a tough world and I am still fighting. . The adsense figure everyday slaps in the face. It's like a stock market ticker which holds you in suspense game for every 15 minutes, the span in which it gets updated. In the initial days, I would almost remain hooked to it and would refresh the screen so many times, in hope that someone at some corner of the world is in my site.

Let me outline some of the things I did on the way:

• Hiring SEO service : I never did that as I was not so much interested in monetization. Also I am still not sure if SEO services can provide a durable solution. There are too many black practices happening out there. They charge upfront and at times hit your website through proxies with different ip and you will be happy to see the traffic increasing in leaps and bounds, but than it dies down with leaps and bounds also. I am not sure if people really understand what SEO means. Some of the things that makes sense to me are as follows. But these are anyway good practices.
  • Making optimized applications which means seving js and css as downloadable files os that they can be cached. Caching the content both at server and browser as much as possible.
  • Giving relevant keywords in meta tags and title.
  • Writing for human beings and not machines.
• Content is King: Beleive me this is one thing that will beat you badly. I am not saying that content should not be ignored but than content is not really the king. (I am assuming that I have written good content...Self prophecy my dear). The problem with present day web is that it is huge in volume. People have very less time to judge if content is good or not. I am sure there are many many good content in the net which probably no one apart from author is going to read. There are billions of blogs where there is only one visitor, the author himself.
• Backlinks: Search engines and searchibility of site depends on backlinks. The more backlink a site has got, the more powerful it is in web. But how to get backlinks and that too from good authoritative sites. There are link farms which can be pruchased but most of the search engine will see those backlinks negatively. Backlinks are the biggest pain in the neck of most of the individual site owners.
• Directory and Search Engine Submissions: You can submit the site into many online directories which I am not sure if any one refers to any more. That's a pre google era. In fact, if we look into the world internet traffic, there are really three players Google, bing and Yahoo. Rest all are meaningless and interesting the three are free and many of the other unknown once will ask money to list you. Probably that's the only way for them to earn money. The one directory that is still considered authoritative is DMOZ and I have submitted my link there. It's a human reviewed directory. And I think my submission is not going to be reviewed in this life.

So what we average mortal do? That's a good question. Those who have started the site or blog for a simple reason to write, keep continue to write and ennjoy.

Is bad good or good is bad? It's very difficult to ascertain that what is bad and what is good at an absoulte scale while it is much easier to define bad or good at a relative scale. When two are in dispute than one's bad is others good and vice versa. When a tigress kills a deer, it's good for tigress cubs but bad for deer's kids. The bad or good is more of a perspective than an absolute theory. Also the relativeness of the theory has to be judged not only in the spatical scale but also in the temporal scale. A certain thing might be bad in the immediate temporal scale but may turn out to be very good in the longer timeline. Change the sides or the scale and same thing may appear in a different way. A bad will become good and a good will become bad. So Bad is Good and Good is Bad.

If we look more closely on any aspect of life or for that matter any aspect of any happening, there is this tension of trying to define in terms of goodness and badness. Look little more closely and one realizes that the good and bad is more dependent on the power of people or machinery trying to push it in that direction.

I am refraining to quote any example and trying to keep this discussion at an abstract level as it might quickly turn out to be controversial. But do this exercise at your end. Take any phenomena or happening for which you carry a very strong opinion. Does not matter if you feel good or bad about it. Now see if there are any other who holds an extremely opposite view to yours. Try to understand why the other side is holding the opposite extreme. Do you find that bad for you is good for others or vice versa. Also try to look at the same thing on a time scale. Is it good or bad for that given second and does it remains good or bad in the similar way in a bigger or may be in a smaller scale. so Bad is Good and Good is Bad.

Please donot take me wrong when I say terrorism is good. There is abolutely no support for their way of working especially when the innocents are killed, for no rhyme or reason. I have absolutely not interest in giving my life for that matter the life of any other individual just because you have a philosophical inclination which many don't abide it.

I am supporting terrorism from a purely economic aspect. Infact this is probably the biggest job creator in last couple of years. At one of the local mall, around two years back I hardly used to see any security guard. Now the whole place is filled with security guards. And I am sure they would be having their heirarchy in terms of mangers and General Managers. And who know may be a Vice President also. It has given jobs to lot of people and thankfully to the people who are on the lower side of the economic hierarchy. What the Alan Greenspan's and Ben Bernake and Timothy Geithener's could not do, Osama Bin Laden did with a master stroke.

It's rightfully to argue that the terrorism may increase the job prospects for security related people but by putting economy into shambles it takes the job out from other parts of economy. Perfectly agree, and it has done couple of times now. But see it as more of a part of economic cycle. In fact, the worse loss for jobs was done not by terrorism but by harping the mythology of internet or latest by financial terrorism. Beyong these economic cycles, terrorism still turns out to be a job creator. I would say "Long live terrorism without getting any success." It's a little cost for me to get myself frisked at every entry and exit, if it provides two square meals to a lot of households.

I was visiting one of the local temple which is situated on the bank of a river. This is a beautiful temple located next to the river bumping against it. Everything is beautiful in that surrounding. The serene banks of water with rich vegetation on the opposite side soothes the eyes. A crane takes a low flight on water and stands on one leg to hunt for its next meal. Then the eyes wander on my side of bank. People sitting on the bank with contemplative mood with their sorrowfulness and happiness and no ness.

And than the eyes start wandering into the water of the river. The eyes meet with the blackness in water. The river looks dead with no sign of any life in it. I pity for the crane for its luck. And than your eyes meet with the numerous traces of human work in action. They are full of plastic bags and idols immersed in water. Not sure what we achieve with that. These things really confuse me. The tussle of reason in a religion. One guy comes and dumps a lot of trash from his temple at home. If god would be lesser happy if he would have disposed it without hurting our river. We have to bring some reason in our religion otherwise we will keep on killing our rivers and ecosystems. How you would feel if someone comes and dumps trash in your house? Remember we are doing the same things to fishes in the river. If still you feel strongly religious about these things, I respect your feelings but would request you to think about that we will left with rivers with no lives. This is just an example I have quoted and we have similar instances in many parts of many of our religions that we practice in earth. Also please do not confuse religion with god.

The photograph below shows the idol in the river. The idol is 10 cm in height. Note the plastic bag and vegetation next to it.

As we work on projects in the smaller cities and rural area of Maharashtra, I do travel to those places often. I happen to be in an inauguration function, where there were heavyweight political leaders. It was like a fare out there. There were couple of thousand people from nearby villages, coming to see and hear political bigwigs. One of my friend was accompanying me and one of the plan of the day was to do some photography. As part of that we just happened to meet some people from a makeshift colony of laborers. Looking at the camera in our hand, they got excited and invited us to take some of their photographs. They thought we are from some news agency, and there is an opportunity to get published in a paper. They were living in a makeshift hut with hardly 4 by 4 feet of space and for sure you cannot stand in the house. I just compared that with the big cars that passed before us taking the influential people. Probably the cost of fuel to bring one of them to the place would be good enough to feed the whole colony for once.

I am not complaining about rich being very rich. It's actually good for the society to have rich people, because it increases the chance of entrepreneurship. There is nothing wrong in being rich. And there are very good rich people out there.

But I do have a complain in the society for poor being very poor. Cannot we develop some sort of economic and social system which guarantees a minimum standard of living to everyone. We can at least assure everyone a good meal, cloths to cover and a decent place what we call as house.

The big question is how we can achieve this. The western countries has achieved it to an extent by building an extensive Social security system. However that system is building a burden now on the government. Also with increasing life span, it is becoming harder to sustain everyone. If we look broadly into the systems that have player a role in this, than we can put capitalism and the socialism at two ends. At conceptual level, socialism is supposed to be better in this respect. But history shows that, the socialism has proven to be not successful in that respect. It has brought undue power to a small set of people. At concept level, capitalism looks bad as it promotes competition to such levels that it becomes difficult for a weaker entity to survive. However capitalism keeps the opportunity with everyone to excel, at any point.

I think this divide cannot be solved by pushing the philosophies from top level. We will have to change the way we are trying to solve this problem. We will have to solve this problem by inverting it and solving. We will have to make sure that everyone in the society gets the basic minimum education and understands his or her rights in the society. Also they get an appreciation of the fact that they also have opportunities to rise. When I talk about education, it's not teaching History, Science or Geography. But we have to teach them the basic concepts of life and that they have a choice in life, if they wish to exercise. Education can be a big differentiators in the life of these people.

This is a world of big numbers. In every aspect of life, what matters is numbers. There are billions of sites in the web. Some companies have revenues running in billions. With advancement in medical science and control over epidemics, we have billions of people on earth now. The most respected people on earth are people with billions and millions of worth. There is terabyte or pentabyte or not sure which byte of data on web and in all the machines all around. Yes, we have progressed a lot.
There are millions of people who sleep daily without having a proper meal ( I wrote mistakenly mail). Millions of new born never become adult. Millions are drug addict and the people living a stressful life is surely in billions.
The silent sufferer in this quantity game is the quality. There is no satisfaction as there is no end to this quantity game. Unfortunately the number system is not closed so there is no chance of seeing an end to this.

Our GDP has grown consistently in last few years (ignoring the temporary blip because of recession). Unfortunately, at the same time the percentage of BPL (Below Poverty Line) families has risen from 30% to 37%. What growth we are talking about? Let's not blame if rich are becoming are super rich, but we should have an overall rising base level. The inclusiveness in the growth should be there. And I believe the government and its policies has to be changed to make this into effect.

When India got independence, there was a euphoria as if all the problems will get resolved automatically. We made the mistake of taking a path, where we made people complacent and lacking in entrepreneurship skills. The path to doing business is full of bureaucracy and red tapism and still is. Everyone thought that the government is responsible for taking care of everyone from birth to death. We soon realized in 90's that this system does not works. It just increases the motivation to do nothing. Enter any government office and one will realize the direction less and the lack of energy there.

I think in this regard, it's very important that government policies should be considered from the perspective that we increase the notion of entrepreneurship at each and every level of society right from cities to small towns and villages. The government should concentrate on providing infrastructure and education and the country will take care of itself. It should concentrate on the following aspects only

• Road network so that everyone is connected.
• Good public transport and charge for it so that it's a viable enterprise.
• Uninterrupted electricity supply. (A big dream)
• Affordable medical facilities. (Let's explore and rejuvenate the traditional methodology in it)
• Good quality basic education
• Internet infrastructure.

Apart from this government can have control on certain aspects which are of national importance in terms of security. Certainly it should not be making steel and mining coals. Once the citizens the enabled the country will grow automatically.