A must read article on the recent Reservation issue...

Beyond Caste

Why only caste? Reserve seats in educational institutions on the basis of schooling, gender and family income. That is the affirmative way to ensure social justice. Purushottam Agrawal opens a critical discussion

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main18.asp?filename=Ne051306beyond_caste.asp

Do read this article if you are a keen follower of the ongoing debate on this Reservation issuem

The story of my first "Paper"

k-RTP : A Reliable Transport Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks......does this make any sense to you?? This is going to be my first paper to be published....hurray!!!

Yesterday my friend manu called me up to tell that our B-Tech final year project got selected for the IASTED conference on Wireless sensor Networks (don't know wat it is, you are free to write to me anytime). This was one real happy news for all three of us...me, manu and irshad. But theres one person who'll be happier than all of us, our project guide Mr. Vinod Pathari. He had been telling us from those last days in college (of which we celebrated the first anniversary recently )....but all of us were too lazy or was it the lack of hope on our project idea...i donno... we didn't send it for any conference for almost a year.

The thrill of entering a professional life should have made us lazy, besides that manu and irshad went to hyderabad and i came to b'lore. Our work schedules kept us busy all the time and in between i even went to my college for an award ceremony(and there pathari sir did ask me about the project paper, and i had to give some excuse ) .

Every time we accidently came upon our project in our discussions, we were pretty eager to get that topic out of our conversation. Things turned around with manu getting transfered to b'lore.... We finally decided to get the ship sailing... It took me and manu just a few days to refresh it and somehow create a draft to be sent for this conference which he had digged out :)

And we waited...or truth being that i even forgot about sending that paper. One week back manu calls up and tells that our paper hasn't been selected. That didnt come as a surprise to me and i even startd asking about what we are supposed to do next. Then he told me that our paper hasnt been completely thrown out, they have just deferred their decision on our paper as they got quite a lot of good papers. We were asked to wait for another week...enough time for me to forget about it again:)

Now yesterday we got the final judgement.....our first paper got selected for an international conference!!!



This is Banff, Alberta, Canada where the conference is to be held from July3-4. I dont know if i'll be able to attend that, but this place looks really cool and i wish i could make it there...



Banff Avenue, looking north towards Cascade Mountain. Banff, Alberta, Canada.
The Banff townsite, photographed from the top of Sulphur Mountain

God's own country...did u ever knew this???

The feeling of pride that you get when you say that you are from "God's own country" is something that every keralite is blessed with. But does anyone know which place was originally called so or who coined the term for the first time???

I was pretty surprised to find that it belonged to one country that i always dream of visiting once. Anyone who has seen the trilogy fondly called LOTR (Lord Of the Rings) and know where the movie was shot would have already guessed that dream location. Yeah, its New Zealand, the land of kiwis.........

"God’s Own Country, often abbreviated to Godzone, is a phrase that has been used for more than 120 years by New Zealanders to describe their homeland. It has subsequently been adopted by some other countries, notably Australia, but this has declined as the phrase has become increasingly associated with New Zealand.

The earliest recorded use of the phrase was as the title of a poem about New Zealand written by Thomas Bracken sometime in the 1880s. It was published in a book of his poems in 1890, and then again in 1893 in a book containing a selection of his works, entitled Lays and Lyrics: God’s Own Country and Other Poems.

God’s Own Country as a phrase was often used and popularised by New Zealand’s longest serving prime minister, Richard John Seddon. He last quoted it on June 10, 1906 when he sent a telegram to the Victorian premier, Thomas Bent, the day before leaving Sydney to return home to New Zealand. "Just leaving for God's own country," he wrote. He never made it, dying the next day on the ship Oswestry Grange.

Bracken’s God’s Own Country is less well known internationally than God Defend New Zealand which he published in 1876. It was declared the country's second national anthem in 1940, and was given equal status to God Save The Queen in 1977.

In the United Kingdom the phrase is used by people from Yorkshire to describe that county, sometimes substituting the word county for country. The government of the South Indian state of Kerala(or Keralam) in India has adopted the phrase God’s Own Country as its slogan. The phrase is also occasionally used to describe the United States of America, usually sarcastically."

from wikipidea