Digging for Meaning

China's vision is to dominate the world's economy with its strategic investments and past currency manipulations : It is foxily forcing indebtedness on smaller countries like Pakistan & Sri Lanka; It is retaining and leveraging technology that it gets exposed to in trade (even as India spends billions in technological purchase but doesn't insist on comparable transfer of technology. Idiots) It is is doing everything possible to remain the factory of the world - either with currency manipulation in the past or by taking control over strategic global resources (read about what it is doing to corner global supply of strategic mineral resources - lithium in australia, canada & africa ; cobalt in Congo ,etc)  ... Essentially, CHINA has a vision. However repressive and terrible for others or its own people, it has a vision to win in the new zero-sum game of global power. (It need not have been a zero-sum game. But right wing assholes across the world are hell bent...

Marketer's assault on our Language = MAOL What do you do to wash your behind in the washroom? Do you trust your hands to do the job with water, or do you use paper? One day in college, a Chinese professor talked about this pertinent question when talking about cultural differences. She talked about how people see tissue paper as an essential solution, while there is an ecologically better solution 'at hand!'. The students were surprised with her point of view. Most of the students hailing from Indian metros, saw the tissue as a better alternative, a logical next step to the 'primitive' practice of washing with hands. That was one of the easy ways to differentiate oneself from the lower classes. The upper class is the one that has access to western lifestyle, which in Indian imagination is a 'step up', a logical next step . But this was different. This was a Chinese lifestyle too. (which is fairly absent from Indian imagination and hence exotic). ...

Round at the curb towards my home in amboli in andheri, is a little plastic tent on the pavement against a co-operative housing soc.'s wall. (to go ahead to my place, i have to chose to walk either by a huge overflowing dumpster on one side of road, or a roadside orgy of shit. well, usually i time right at the moment to walk in the middle of the road through that distance. ) the place has plastic strewn all over by the tent. the family, it seems, is in the business of sorting out the different kinds of plastics that are dumped. 3 yr olds, 30 yr olds, 60 yr old family members are usually busy separating bottles from plastic bags from plastic objects from... the odd thing is the tenants keep on changing every 2 months while the tent remains the same. i guess. well, i have been here 6 months, and seen 3 families. well, anyways, the object of this post is something else. it concerns the current tenants. it apparently is a family of a couple with more than handful kids and a few elders....

When one talk of DN, some of the strongest ramifications of this concept is in the field of education. Indeed, the increasing ineffectiveness of education system n pedagogy were the reasons that the concept of DN came to fore. A few days back, I was thinking of the same while attending a lecture, and thought of an experiment. Essentially, I want to experiment if teaching efficacy increases if we uses multiple media simultaneously during the course of lecture. A normal class here at MICA, employs visual aids (projector, boards, charts, papers), audio aids (speakers, mics) but the use of this media is mostly one sided (though the class participation usually is quite high in conventional sense. Laptops are 'down' during lecture though, faculty just doesn't trust us :P). what i propose is use of social media such as twitter, social networks, wikis etc real time during a lecture to create a more collaborative atmosphere in a lecture. I talked with prof. Chandan Chatterjee about...