Panguni Uthiram wishes

Panguni Uthiram is the day for the glorification of Grahasta Dharma (married life).

 

During Panguni, Moon comes to ‘Uthira nakshathram’ on or close to Pournami always. The marriage of Shiva - Parvati, Murugan - Devasena, Aandal – Rangamannar and Ram - Sita took place on Panguni Pournami Uthiram.

 

Wishes to one and all on this auspicious day.

Day of the martyrs

Today was the day when Bhagat, Sukhdev and Raj Guru were hanged to death..     23rd of March 1931

 

I salute the brave heroes. Your legacy lives on.

 

One great example of the British rule

According to official figures, 28,825,000 Indians starved to death between 1854 and 1901. The authority's carelessness and lack of foresight accentuated the misery caused by famines.

The scene of Kattabomman arguing with Jackson comes to my mind when I read the following. It had never stuck me when I watched that movie.

Before British rule, there was no private property in land. The self-governing village community handed over each year to the ruler or his nominee a share of the years produce. East India Company put a stop to this and introduced a new revenue system superseding the right of the village community over land and creating two new forms of property on land - landlordism and individual peasant proprietorship. It was assumed that the State was the supreme landlord. Fixed tax payments were introduced based on land whereby payment had to be made to the government whether or not crop had been successful. As one British put it we have introduced new methods of assessing and cultivating land revenue which have converted a once flourishing population into a huge horde of paupers. Indeed the first effect was the reduction in agricultural incomes by 50% thereby undermining the agrarian economy and self-governing village. 

It was never hard for me to believe that British are the reason for India’s poverty nor do I change my opinion. They caused a demise of our industries and thus our people. I am reminded of a tamil saying ‘Kurangu kaila kidacha poomalai madhiri’.

 

Reading Digital Fortress

Its about cryptography and Dan Brown has proposed a confusing concept call rotating cleartext. Yet to get the full measure of it.

There is a great machine at one of the intelligence agencies of US. It applies brute force cracking of all encryption algorithms till a programmer writes a algorithm that perpetually mutates the text based on a time variant. He names it Digital Fortress. Now, terrorists can safely pass the information using this algo. Whoz gonna save the world?

It still has the punch of Dan Brown but I think Da Vinci code was more natural to him.

In my hometown

I am back home. Reached today morning. Good to be back here after Deepavali. Our school friends are starting an initiative to help our juniors. Drafted our plans today. Hope it goes well.

Wanted to install Linux in my computer. Its a 5 years old, P2-400Mhz, 100Mhz FSB thing. Searched my collection and found PCQ Linux 8.0 (2003). Chose GUI installation and when I was using Druid, the system hanged. I rebooted and tried again but in vain.

Gave up, restarted and keyed in this post.