Minidebconf Tamilnadu 2023, Tinnitus, Cooking, Books and Series.

First up is Minidebconf Tamilnadu 2023 that would be held on 28-29 January 2023. You can find rest of the details here. I do hope we get to see/hear some good stuff from the Minidebconf. Best of luck to all those who are applying.

Tinnitus

During the lock-down of March 2020, I became aware of noise in ears and subsequently major hearing loss. It took me quite a while to know that Tinnitus happens to both those who have hearing loss as well as not. I keep running into threads like this and as shared by someone nobody knows what really causes it. I did try some of the apps (an app. called Resound on Android) that is supposed to tackle Tinnitus but it hasn’t helped much. There is this but at least for me, right now pretty speculative. Also this, and again highly speculative.

Cooking

After mum passed away, I haven’t cooked anything. This used to give me pleasure but now just doesn’t feel right. Cooking is something you enjoy when you are doing for somebody else and not just for yourself, at least that’s how I feel and with that the curiosity to know more recipes. I do wanna buy a wok at sometime but when, how I just don’t know.

Books

Have been reading books quite a bit. And due to that had to again revisit and understand ISBN. Perhaps I might have shared it before. It really is something, the history of ISBN. And that co-relates with the book I read, Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett. Raising Steam is the 40th Book in the Discworld Series and it basically romanticizes and reminisces how the idea of an engine was born, and then a steam engine and how actually Railways started. There has been a lot of history and experiences from the early years of Steam Railway that have been taken and transplanted into the book. Also how Railways is and can be successful if only it is invested wisely and maintenance is done. This is only where imagination and reality come apart as maintenance isn’t done and then you have issues. While this is and was in the UK, similar situation exists in India and many other places around the world and doesn’t matter whether it is private or public. Exceptions are German, French but then that maybe due to Labor movements that happened and were successful unlike in other places. I could go on but then it will become a different article in itself. Suffice to say there is much to learn and you need serious people to look after it. Both in UK and India we lack that. And not just in Railways but Civil Aviation too, but again that is a story in itself.

Web-series

Apart from books, have been seeing web-series that Willow is a good one that I enjoyed even though I hadn’t seen the earlier movie. While there has been a flurry of movies and web-series both due to end of year and beginning of 2023 and yet have tried to be a bit partial on what I wanna watch or not. If it has crime, fantasy, drama then usually I like it. For e.g. I saw Blackout and pretty much was engrossed in what will happen next. It also does lead you to ask questions about centralization vs de-centralization for both power and other utilities and does make a case for communities to have their utilities apart from the grid as a fallback. How do we do over decades or centuries about it is a different question perhaps altogether. There were two books that kinda stood out for me, the first was Ian Rankin’s ‘Naming of the Dead’. The book is about a cynical John Rebus, a man after my own heart. I am probably going to buy a few more of his series. In a way it also tells you why UK is the way it is right now. Another book that I liked was Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde. This is one of the books that Mum would have clearly liked. It is pretty unusual while at the same time very close to 1984 and other such dystopian novels. The main trope of the book is what color you can see and how much you can see. The main character is somebody who can see Red, around the age of 20. One of the interesting aspects of the book is ‘de-facting’ which closely resembles the Post-Truth world where alternative facts can be made out of air and they don’t need any scientific evidence to back them up. In Jasper’s world, they don’t care about how things work and most of the technology is banned and curiosity is considered harmful and those who show that are murdered one way or the other. Interestingly, the author has just last year decided to start book 2 in the 3 book series that is supposed to be. This also tells why the U.S. is such a precarious situation in a way. A part of it is also due to the media which is in hands of chosen few, the same goes for UK and India, almost an oligopoly.

The Great Escape

This is also a book but also about experiences of people, not in 19th-20th century but today that tells you slavery is alive and well and human-trafficking as well. This piece from NPR tells you about an MNC and Indian workers. What I found interesting is that there barely is an mention of the Indian Embassy that is supposed to help Indian people. I do know for a fact that the embassies of India has seen a drastic shortage of both people and materials even since the new Govt. came in place that was nine years ago. Incidentally, BBC shared about the Gujarat riots 2002 and that has been censored in India. They keep quiet about the UK Govt. who did find out that the Chief Minister was directly responsible for the killings and in facts his number 2, Amit Shah had shared that we would do 2002 again in the election cycle barely a month ago. But sadly, no hate speech FIR or any action was taken against Mr. Shah. There have been attempts by people to showcase the documentary. For e.g. JNU tried it and the rowdies from ABVP (arm of BJP) created violence. Even the questions that has been asked by the Wire, GOI will not acknowledge them.

Interestingly, all India’s edtechs have taken a beating in the last 6-8 months including the biggest BJYU’s. Sharing a story from 2021 where things were best and today all of them are at bottom. In fact, the public has been wary as the prices of the courses has kept on increasing and most ‘case studies’ have been found to be fake. Also the general outlook on jobs and growth has been pessimistic. In fact, most companies have been shedding jobs truckloads, most in the I.T. sector but other sectors as well. Hospitality and other related sectors have taken a huge beating, part of it post-pandemic, part of it Govt’s refusal to either spend money or do any positive policies for either infrastructure, education, medical, you name it, they think private sector has all the answers which has been proven to be wrong again and again. I did not want to end on a discordant note but things are the way they are 😦

The King of Torts – John Grisham

John Grisham The King of Torts

Lots of things have been happening and I have been unable to be on top of things. There are so many things that happen and keep on happening and a lot of it is just not in control. For those who are watching Brexit, India is going through the same/similar phenomena just without Brexit. I would not like to delve much into Indian happenings as there is no sweet story to tell.

Mum is in hospital (diabetic foot) so a lot of time to read books. So I have been making use of the time and at the same time learning or making connections from what I know of the history of the world which goes on enriching what I read all the time. For e.g. in this book, opens up with people who are on Crack. Now while the book is set in 2003, it is still relevant today for a lot of things. There have been rumors and whatnot that the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan supplied a lot of cocaine to black folks in the early 1980s. While that has never been proved, it has been proved somewhat that the CIA and even people in the state department were part of providing crack cocaine to African Americans (as they refer to blacks) in those days. Whether this was because of black power rising or non-profits like ACLU or other organizations is beyond me. I had also read that the GOP (Republicans/Grand Old Party) in the 1970s itself when computers became fast and could do a lot of processing, came to know if education would be as it is, then soon they would no voters. hence they decided to defund education in America, the end result being massive education loans to prospective students and perhaps partly the reason why China produces more than enough STEM graduates than the total number of Americans who become graduates. It is a shame nonetheless, that education in the U.S. is never top 😦 . This is somewhat from a Republican perspective. That is also the reason they are much anti-science.

Tort Cases

India doesn’t have either class-action suits or tort cases. But before we go headlong, this is what tort means. The book however is not about general tort cases but medical tort cases. The idea is that medical companies often produce medicines claiming they solve x or y issues but more often than not they take short-cuts to get approval from FDA and other regulators. And sooner or later those medicines can and do have harmful effects on the body, sometimes resulting in death.

One of the more interesting articles that I read and probably also shared is the work done by Mr. Rob Bilott. While it is a typical David and Goliath story once you read the book, you realize that there are and were many difficulties in Mr. Rob’s path that are never fully appreciated or even worked out. The biggest issue is the 8 years that he paid out of his own pocket to get the hundreds and thousands of people tested. How many of us would do that?

And this is before proving causation of any disease, illness or anything to a particular environment, pollution etc. is hard even then and even now. Whatever money the victims receive afterward and whatever went to Mr. Rob Bilott would never compensate for the stress faced by him. And lawyers have to be careful, if they ask too little, they are not hurting the company and there is no change in its behavior. If they ask too much, the company can declare Chapter 11, bankruptcy so they have to keep the balance.

There is also a lot of greed shown by the tort lawyer and while at the end he does tell about a company’s nefarious activities that he suspects he could share his opinion only after giving up his law career. There is and was talk of tort-reform in the book but as can be seen if you ‘reform’ tort there is just no way to punish such companies but that is in the U.S.

There is also some observations that I have shared over the years, for e.g. Europe bans far more drugs than the U.S. does. A major part of it is perhaps due to the fact that Europe has 26/27 independent medical regulators and one country bans medicine for one or the other reason, the rest of Europe also bans the same. In the U.S. it is only the FDA. I have read they have had both funding and staffing issues for years and this is from before the pandemic. The Indian regulators are much worse. One could follow Priyanka Pulla’s articles in Mint and others where she has shared how the regulator is corrupt and lazy and a combo of both.

And all of this is besides how doctors are corrupted in India by marketing executives of pharma companies. That would be a whole article in itself. In short, when you read this book, there are so many thoughts that come alive when you are reading the book. The sad part is the book doesn’t offer any solutions at all. John Grisham’s books are usually legal thrillers and courtroom exchanges, this one though is and was very different. This one sadly doesn’t take one to any conclusion apart from the fact that we live in an imperfect world and there don’t seem to be any solutions. This was even shared by Rep. Katie Porter in her pinned tweet. The Abbvie’s of the world will continue to take common people like you and me for a ride.

Inequality in Indian Education

Farmer on-going protests

Before I start with the education system in India which I have talked about many times in the past, first let me share couple of pieces about the farmer movement which is still at Sanghu Delhi border.

<Manjeet Kaur,62 at farmer protest with her friends.

The above picture became somewhat viral as it showed Manjeet Kaur, who drove down from Patiala, Punjab to Sanghu border along with her friends to take part in the on-going protests. The picture not only shares how the women are part and parcel of this protest but also they are independently taking part in the protest.

The other were two articles I read today, first was an article in tribune which questions that if the policy worked, why it didn’t work in the state of Bihar. The other by a young law student who had to go from Chandigarh to Delhi with family for some work and her experience with the ongoing protest. In fact, an interesting observation was made by the CJI in the many suits against farmer protests in the SC. This makes for much more interesting read when you see an RTI query filed by Saket Gokhale to NHAI , a Central Govt. agency which is supposed to be independent and asks if they had filed an FIR and asked compensation from Haryana State and Haryana State Police which had dug up National Highway 44 and if any permission was asked for the same from NHAI. And NHAI unable to take any action for the same. If this isn’t shameful, I dunno what is –

Saket Gokhale’s RTI query on digging up NH44

NHAI response to Saket Gokhale’s query.

Sadly, the way the response has been worded makes it impossible for NHAI to discharge its own responsibilities and this becomes a precedent for other states now that know that NHAI is vulnerable. A pretty sad turn on events.

Indian Education can’t go online

There was a recent article on scroll which shared how Indian education can’t go online as only a few have computers with decent netlink speeds as well as other factors which are needed for online education. But there are also many things that the article doesn’t take into account which actually make the task more difficult and raise the boundary more.

Now in most schools and colleges, the number of students to teacher ratio could be anywhere between 70-150 or even more. In the last few years, a lot of schools have been closed down by various Governments, including and not limited to the ruling Govt. They have in fact intensified closures of public schools wherever their Govt. has been in power. Closing to 5000+ schools in one state in a year is a dramatic shift and such has been happening time and again. In fact, the rising costs of Indian education has made many to leave Indian shores and do studies abroad. And once they do their masters or whatever, the chances of them coming back to India become more and more remote. In India the costs have been becoming so bad that NBFC’s have started products targeting the same. How NBFC and Banks have (both public and private) have fared with respect to Indian consumers needs its own blog post but one word to describe it is ‘bad’. But as shared above, needs its own blog post.

Coming to the Indian context though, what has not been captured in that article is that the responsibility of making new content also raises huge barriers for teachers. My own experience in teacher’s trainings for ICT usage has shown that most teachers do not know and use internet effectively both to sustain their own curiosity as well as their students. Part of which is whether you are private employee or a public school teacher, the teacher is not paid enough. I have had multiple conversations with friends over the years who are teachers who shared that they get 50% salary in-hand while they sign for 100%. This is more in the case or private schools though. In Govt. schools, the teachers apart from their regular administrative duties apart from teaching duties are also unpaid labor for Govt. policy. Take the recent covid crisis, it was the teachers who for months together went from door-to-door asking if they had a covid patient. This was all over India. Even for voter registration, census, polio and various other immunization efforts, the teachers are roped in. So apart from that, they somehow have to figure out how to make ends meet and also boost student morale. Hence the attention is only limited to the first couple of benches rather than the whole as a 45-minute to an hr. session is just not enough to go through a class of 70-150 school students giving individual attention. And this is when for most teachers, teaching is a means to an end and not the end itself.

I am going to take one example of science and sort of break-it-down in multiple steps and how I would have approached that topic for say the 5th-6th standard students in say a public school in Pune and especially if Covid would not have been an issue so you have face-to-face meetup.

There was recent news about a mysterious radio signal which came from one of our closest galactic neighbors Proxima Centauri. Now let’s say there was a class I was teaching/sharing which I had shared before and there already is trust formed.

So before coming to the news, I would tell the students about frequency and more generally the notation of why we like to measure things and how we measure things. There is so much beautiful history which could be acted and enacted which can show and remains in mind why measurement is needed. Once that is understood, discussed and an underpinning is established, we could move to human perception or the lack of it. We know that humans have lots of limits in almost everything, whether it is talking, touching, hearing, all of our five senses are pretty limited with what we know of spectrum available in the immediate family kingdom as well as in the Universe. I would start with how far can a person throw his voice and be heard without using any other means. There does come a point where they need to use anything from a megaphone to a loudspeaker and what it actually does.

The other thing I would then talk is about the radio and ask the students to find more about the internals of a radio. If possible to bring an old radio to school where it could be disassembled. After they are familiar with some names of the electronic components and what they do, take them to the electronics market where they try to source all the things needed to make a radio and whatever they encounter. This would allow the students to try and do bargain shopping as well as learn from where to source things. Some might even get a copy or two of electronic projects where the shop themselves sell blueprints to hobbyists so that they can tinker.

If there is a place in the school where soldering can be done, then all can try and sooner or later we come to know if something works or not. There is also possibility of talking about noise cancellation and then the topic of ITU can also be bought up and how they do frequency allocation. Last but not the least then the topic can be approached about an alien civilization and an unknown radio signal and what it means and what it can mean.

Now if just one topic can give such a wide range of things to do and develop an understanding about not the subject itself but surrounding subjects as well I see no reason why teachers can’t do this except they are handcuffed to lot of policy as well as real-life constraints.

For e.g. I remember in my school days, we used to go out once or twice a year and that used to be either a school picnic or something similar. The only other I know is going to Mumbai for Nehru planetarium and Nehru science Centre. Unfortunately, I didn’t go at that time because the school was taking students via air and the tickets were super costly at the time and that too for a 10 minute journey between the two cities. Those were different days, today you can’t have a direct flight between the two cities as it doesn’t make an economic sense. It makes more sense to go to Mumbai via train or bus as you will reach Mumbai in about couple of hrs. Of course, Pune does have its own planetarium at New English school and there are a few amateur astronomy clubs in Pune but nothing on the scale that what Mumbai has, but then this is getting off-topic.

Now, again in an online world could this be done? Not without both the teacher and the student both spending lot of resources online and even then will be a lower understanding as both the hands-on experience as well as interacting with other students and learning from other students (aping) would be hugely limited. Even the social skills that students develop in a school setting will be rusted. My own social skills probably have weakened and rusted as I have very limited interaction with people over the past few months due to Covid fears and would be at least for the next few years till a large enough population is not vaccinated.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Truth, Untruths and Education in India.

I read this somewhat disturbing and yet pretty raw truth from foreign affairs. It took me quite a few days to not only digest but also say yes and see the same situation playing out in India. I have been seeing the discourse on Twitter and while a part of it is the equivalent of road rage, a huge part is a disconnect to not acknowledge and be civil. We may come to different conclusions from the same data but being civil seems to be difficult for a lot of people. One part is of course ego, where nobody wants to lose, but more than that are the plain comprehension issues. Most of the literature, good literature is unfortunately based in English.

And while we can have differing opinions of what constitutes good literature, for me it’s books like Battle of Belonging,The:On Nationalism, Patriotism, and What it Means – Shashi Tharoor. From what little I have understood, the book makes the case of civic nationalism which is far more inclusive than the narrow confines of patriotism. Now this begs the question when you have such books and many books which do tell you about different aspects of social, political and knowledge, why are so many people prone to disinformation in India similar to U.S. and probably other countries as well. One of the biggest reasons per-se is lack of education and quality education. When the number of graduates is less than five percent how do you expect that population to be able to take decisions in their economic self-interest? So sadly the understanding is ingrained from WhatsApp and there is no need to check from alternate sources. And just like Mr. Trump followers, they believe those versions to be the unvarnished truth. I do understand that no truth is immutable except for life and death. All others are imperfect unless it is validated by some sort of scientific validation behind it. At the same time, these truths may themselves be invalidated if a stronger scientific evidence establishes itself. This is the reason why hypothesis and facts themselves are challenged again and again. Sharing couple of examples below.

Nationalization of Banking, RERA and RCEP

Most of the people want freedom of the banks i.e. private banking don’t really know that private banking existed at a time in free India before they were nationalized and these banks failed at surprisingly regular intervals. Now it isn’t as if this fact is hidden but it is not as popular as maybe some other facts or ideas. Now the Government in the center obviously doesn’t want to share these facts as they want corporates in banking. And if that fact is known by many people it will be a huge setback to their plans. RBI failures have been to many to count. Even recent legislations like RERA and others which were supposed to bring relief to millions of potential homeowners has become a pawn in the hands of builders and this has been known.

One of the interesting points of RCEP which is not so much in public domain is that RCEP would have a mere 4.5% duty on most products which will go down to 1.5% over a 20 year period. Now with India staying out of it, we have done two things. We have said that we will not be competitive even after 20 years of this which is the more damning part. And we will not take part in the growth that other countries will have due to this.

Contempt Proceedings against Comic Artist because she has an opinion on SC

The fall in SC and constitutional values grows day by day. The AG today consented to have contempt proceedings against a comic artist saying she insulted the SC. Gone are the days when an artist made fun of the PM, and she gave him a Padam Shri (one of the highest civilian honors) for his contributions. Then, even dissent or being cynical was looked as being a contribution to the national effort rather than today. This is the reason why India has been continuously falling in the Global Freedom of Expression Index. I have seen censoring many a time here. I, myself has been locked out of Wikipedia many times. Can you imagine, being locked out of Wikipedia which is perhaps one of the more neutral sites on the web. And then there was this wikibio thing, such a sad thing to happen. Guessing this is the future of the Indian interweb. 😦

Stick figure by Sanitary Panels on SC

White Hat Senior and Education

I had been thinking of doing a blog post on RCEP which China signed with 14 countries a week and a day back but this new story has broken and is being viraled a bit on the interwebs, especially twitter and is pretty much in our domain so thought would be better to do a blog post about it. Also, there is quite a lot packed so quite a bit of unpacking to do.

Whitehat, Greyhat and Blackhat

For those of you who may not, there are actually three terms especially in computer science as well as security that one comes across. Those are white hats, grey hats and black hats. Now clinically white hats are like the fiery angels or the good guys who basically take permissions to try and find out weakness in an application, program, website, organization and so on and so forth. A somewhat dated reference to what hackers are could be Sandra Bullock (The Net 1995) , Sneakers (1992), Live Free or Die Hard (2007) . Of the three one could argue that Sandra was actually into viruses which are part of computer security but still she showed some bad-ass skills, but then that is what actors are paid to do 🙂 Sneakers was much more interesting for me because in that you got the best key which can unlock any lock, something like quantum computing is supposed to do. One could equate both the first movies in either as a White hat or a Grey hat . A Grey hat is more flexible in his/her moral values, and they are plenty of such people. For e.g. Julius Assange could be described as a Grey hat, but as you can see and understand those are moral issues.

A black hat on the other hand is one who does things for profit even if it harms the others. The easiest fictitious examples are all Die Hard series, all of them except the 4th one, all had bad guys or black hats. The 4th also had but is the odd one out as it had Matthew Farell (Justin Long) as a Grey hat hacker. In real life Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen, Robert Tappan Morris, George Hotz, Gary McKinnon are some examples of hackers, most of whom were black hats, most of them reformed into white hats and security specialists. There are many other groups and names but that perhaps is best for another day altogether.

Now why am I sharing this. Because in all of the above, the people who are using and working with the systems have better than average understanding of systems and they arguably would be better than most people at securing their networks, systems etc. but as we shall see in this case there has been lots of issues in the company.

WhiteHat Jr. and 300 Million Dollars

Before I start this, I would like to share that for me this suit in many ways seems to be similar to the suit filed against Krishnaraj Rao . Although the difference is that Krishnaraj Rao’s case/suit is that it was in real estate while this one is in ‘education’ although many things are similar to those cases but also differ in some obvious ways. For e.g. in the suit against Krishnaraj Rao, the plaintiff’s first approached the High Court and then the Supreme Court. Of course Krishnaraj Rao won in the High Court and then in the SC plaintiff’s agreed to Krishnaraj Rao’s demands as they knew they could not win in SC. In that case, a compromise was reached by the plaintiff just before judgement was to be delivered.

In this case, the plaintiff have directly approached the Delhi High Court. The charges against Mr. Poonia (the defendant in this case) are very much similar to those which were made in Krishnaraj Rao’s suit hence won’t be going into those details. They have claimed defamation and filed a 20 crore suit. The idea is basically to silence any whistle-blowers.

Fictional Character Wolf Gupta

The first issue in this case or perhaps one of the most famous or infamous character is an unknown. While he has been reportedly hired by Google India, BJYU, Chandigarh. This has been reported by Yahoo News. I did a cursory search on LinkedIn to see if there indeed is a wolf gupta but wasn’t able to find any person with such a name. I am not even talking the amount of money/salary the fictitious gentleman is supposed to have got and the various variations on the salary figures at different times and the different ads.

If I wanted to, I could have asked few of the kind souls whom I know are working in Google to see if they can find such a person using their own credentials but it probably would have been a waste of time. When you show a LinkedIn profile in your social media, it should come up in the results, in this case it doesn’t. I also tried to find out if somehow BJYU was a partner to Google and came up empty there as well. There is another story done by Kan India but as I’m not a subscriber, I don’t know what they have written but the beginning of the story itself does not bode well.

While I can understand marketing, there is a line between marketing something and being misleading. At least to me, all of the references shared seems misleading at least to me.

Taking down dissent

One of the big no-nos at least from what I perceive, you cannot and should not take down dissent or critique. Indians, like most people elsewhere around the world, critique and criticize day and night. Social media like twitter, mastodon and many others would not exist in the place if criticisms are not there. In fact, one could argue that Twitter and most social media is used to drive engagements to a person, brand etc. It is even an official policy in Twitter. Now you can’t drive engagements without also being open to critique and this is true of all the web, including of WordPress and me 🙂 . What has been happening is that whitehatjr with help of bjyu have been taking out content of people citing copyright violation which seems laughable.

When citizens critique anything, we are obviously going to take the name of the product otherwise people would have to start using new names similar to how Tom Riddle was known as ‘Dark Lord’ , ‘Voldemort’ and ‘He who shall not be named’ . There have been quite a few takedowns, I just provide one for reference, the rest of the takedowns would probably come in the ongoing suit/case.

Whitehat Jr. ad showing investors fighting

Now a brief synopsis of what the ad. is about. The ad is about a kid named ‘Chintu’ who makes an app. The app. Is so good that investors come to his house and right in the lawn and start fighting each other. The parents are enjoying looking at the fight and to add to the whole thing there is also a nosy neighbor who has his own observations. Simply speaking, it is a juvenile ad but it works as most parents in India, as elsewhere are insecure.

Jihan critiquing the whitehatjr ad

Before starting, let me assure that I asked Jihan’s parents if it’s ok to share his ad on my blog and they agreed. What he has done is broken down the ad and showed how juvenile the ad is and using logic and humor as a template for the same. He does make sure to state that he does not know how the product is as he hasn’t used it. His critique was about the ad and not the product as he hasn’t used that.

The Website

If you look at the website, sadly, most of the site only talks about itself rather than giving examples that people can look in detail. For e.g. they say they have few apps. on Google play-store but no link to confirm the same. The same is true of quite a few other things. In another ad a Paralympic star says don’t get into sports and get into coding. Which athlete in their right mind would say that? And it isn’t that we (India) are brimming with athletes at the international level. In the last outing which was had in 2016, India sent a stunning 117 athletes but that was an exception as we had the women’s hockey squad which was of 16 women, and even then they were overshadowed in numbers by the bureaucratic and support staff. There was criticism about the staff bit but that is probably a story for another date.

Most of the site doesn’t really give much value and the point seems to be driving sales to their courses. This is pressurizing small kids as well as teenagers and better who are in the second and third year science-engineering whose parents don’t get that it is advertising and it is fake and think that their kids are incompetent. So this pressurizes both small kids as well as those who are learning, doing in whatever college or educational institution . The teenagers more often than not are unable to tell/share with them that this is advertising and fake. Also most of us have been on a a good diet of ads. Fair and lovely still sells even though we know it doesn’t work.

This does remind me of a similar fake academy which used very much similar symptoms and now nobody remembers them today. There used to be an academy called Wings Academy or some similar name. They used to advertise that you come to us and we will make you into a pilot or an airhostess and it was only much later that it was found out that most kids were doing laundry work (housekeeping) in hotels and other such work. Now I don’t mean that housekeeping is bad or something, it is an essential service like others that are required, but the difference is what you showcase and what you deliver as a product in the end.

Many had taken loans, went bankrupt and even committed suicide because they were unable to pay off the loans due to the dreams given by the company and the harsh realities that awaited them. They were sued in court but dunno what happened but soon they were off the radar so we never came to know what happened to those million of kids whose life dreams were shattered.

Security

Now comes the security part. They have alleged that Mr. Poonia broke into their systems. While this may be true, what I find funny is that with the name Whitehat, how can they justify it? If you are saying you are white hat you are supposed to be much better than this. And while I have not tried to penetrate their systems, I did find it laughable that the site is using an expired https:// certificate. I could have tried further to figure out the systems but I chose not to. How they could not have an automated script to get the certificate fixed is beyond me, this is known as certificate outage and is very well understood in the industry. There are tools like Let’s Encrypt and Certbot (both EFF) and many others. But that is their concern, not mine.

Comparison

A similar offering would be unacademy but as can be seen they neither try to push you in any way and nor do they make any ridiculous claims. In fact how genuine unacademy is can be gauged from the fact that many of its learning resources are available to people to see on YT and if they have tools they can also download it. Now, does this mean that every educational website should have their content for free, of course not. But when a channel has 80% – 90% of it YT content as ads and testimonials then they surely should give a reason to pause both for parents and students alike. But if parents had done that much research, then things would not be where they are now.

Allegations

Just to complete, there are allegations by Mr. Poonia with some screenshots which show the company has been doing a lot of bad things. For e.g. they were harassing an employee at night 2 a.m. who was frustrated and working in the company at the time. Many of the company staff routinely made sexist and offensive, sexual abusive remarks privately between themselves for prospective women who came to interview via webcam (due to the pandemic). There also seems to be a bit of porn on the web/mobile server of the company as well. There also have been allegations that while the company says refund is done next day, many parents who have demanded those refunds have not got it. Now while Mr. Poonia has shared some quotations of the staff while hiding the identities of both the victims and the perpetrators, the language being used in itself tells a lot. I am in two minds whether to share those photos or not hence atm choosing not to. Poonia has also contended that all teachers do not know programming, and they are given scripts to share. There have been some people who did share that experience with him –

Suruchi Sethi

From the company’s side they are alleging he has hacked the company servers and would probably be using the Fruit of the poisonous tree argument which we have seen have been used in many arguments.

Conclusion

Now that lies in the eyes of the Court whether the single bench chooses the literal meaning or use the spirit of the law or the genuine concerns of the people concerned. While in today’s hearing while the company asked for a complete sweeping injunction they were unable to get it. Whatever may happen, we may hope to see some fireworks in the second hearing which is slated to be on 6.01.2021 where all of this plays out. Till later.

Life, Liberty and Kashmir

I was going to write about history of banking today but because the blockade is still continuing in Kashmir, I am forced to write my opinions on it and clear at least some ideas and myths various people have about Kashmir. Before I start though, I hope the Goa Debian Utsav was good. While I haven’t seen any reports, I hope it went well. Frankly, I was in two minds whether I should apply for the Debutsav in Goa or not. While there is a possibility that I could have applied and perhaps even got the traveling sponsorship, I was unsure as to what to tell the students. With recovery of the economy in India at least 6 quarters away if not more, it would have been difficult for me to justify to the students as to how to look for careers in I.T. when salaries of most professionals have been stagnant, lowered and even retention happening in Pune, Bangalore and other places it would have been difficult to say that.

Anyways, this would be a long one. I would like to start with a lawsuit filed in Kerala which was shared and the judgement which was given which at least in my view was a progressive decision. The case I am reciting is ”Right To Access Internet Is Part Of Right To Privacy And Right To Education‘ which was given by Kerala HC recently. The judgement of the case is at https://www.livelaw.in/pdf_upload/pdf_upload-364655.pdf which I reproduce below as well.

Right-to-access-internet-is-right-to-privacy-judgement
Download

So let us try to figure out what the suit/case was all about and how it involves the larger question of communication blockades and other things in Kashmir. The case involves a woman student of 18 years of age, a Faheema shirin (Petitioner) who came to Kerala for higher studies (B.Ed) at an institute called Narayanguru College located in Kozhikhode District. Incidentally, I have been fortunate to visit Kerala and Khozikhode District and they are beautiful places but we can have that conversation some other day. Now apparently, she was expelled from the college hostel for using the mobile phone during study time. The College is affiliated to University of Calicut. Now according to statements from the hostel matron, the petitioner and others, it became clear that inmates of the hostel were not allowed to use mobile phones from 10 p.m. to 6.a.m. -i.e. 22:00 hrs. to 0600 hrs. Apparently, this rule was changed to 1800 hrs – 2000 hrs. arbitrarily. The petitioner’s house is 150 kms. from the place. When she said it is not possible to follow the rules because of the subjects she was studying as well as she needed to connect to home anytime she wanted or her father or relatives may feel to call her or in case of any help. She alleged discrimination as these rules were only made for the girl’s hostel and not for the boy’s hostel. I had also seen and felt the same but as shared that’s for another day altogether.

The petitioner invoked the Conventions on Eliminations of all forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979, the Beijing Declaration and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which GOI is a signatory and hence had to abide by its rules. She further contended that her education depended on her using digital technology with access to web as given in her textbook. She needed to scan the QR codes in various places in her textbooks and use the link given therein to see videos, animations etc. on a digital platform called swayam. Incidentally, it seems swayam runs on closed source software as shared by SFLC.in on their website. Now if it is closed, commercial software than most probably the only the content can be viewed is via streaming rather than downloading, going offline and seeing it as that would attract provisions of the IT ACT and perhaps would constitute piracy. While this point was not argued, it seemed pertinent for me to point out as few people on social media have asked about. In several such cases it is either impossible or you have to be an expert in order to manipulate and download such data (like Snowdem did) but then that’s again a story for another day. Interestingly, the father in the case above was also in the favor of the girl using mobile phone for whatever purpose as he trusts her implicitly and she is adult enough to make her own life choices.

Thankfully, the petitioner had presence of mine throughout the journey that she did all her correspondence through letters instead of orally and had documentary evidence to back up all her claims. The State Govt. of Kerala has been on the forefront of digital technology for a long while and me and many of my friends have been both witness and played our small parts in whichever way to see Kerala become an IT hub. While they still do need to do a lot more but that again is a story for another day. While there was lot of back and forth between her, the hostel authorities, the father and the hostel authorities, she, her father, the hostel authorities and the college but they were unable to resolve the issues amicably. Her grounds for the fight were –

a. She is an adult and of rational mind so she can make decisions on her own.
b. She has right of privacy ( as shared by the Honorable Supreme Court in its 2017 landmark judgement)
c. She needs the mobile and the laptop for studying as her studies demand her using Internet.
d. She also relied and used the budget speech made by Minister of Finance and State Government for making internet accessible to all citizens and recognizing the right to Internet as a human right.
e. Her violation to right of property under Article 300 A.

In order to further bolster her case, through her lawyers she cited further judgements and studies which show how women are disadvantaged to Internet access, in particular she cited a UNESCO study which tells the same.

The judge, Honorable Jutice P.V. Asha guided herself with the arguments and counter-arguments by both parties, she also delved into Calicut University First Ordinances under which the University, the college and the hostel come in to see how thngs fare there. She had also asked the respondent that by using Internet has she or any other student in the hostel ever caused disturbance to any of the other inmates to which the reply was negative. The Judge also determined that if a miuse of a mobile phone or laptop has to happen, it can happen any time, anywhere and you cannot and should not control adult behavior especially when it collides with dignity and freedom of an adult. The learned counsel for the petitioner also shared resolution 23/2 in the UN General Assembly held on 24th June 2013 which talks of freedom of expression and opinion for women’s empowerment to which India is a signatory. There is also resolution 20/8 of 5th July 2012 which also underscores the point. Both the portions of the resolution can be found on page 18 of the judgement. The judge also cited few other judgements which were pointed out by the learned counsel for the petitioner, the Vishaka Judgement (1997) , the Beijing Statement and several other cases and judgement which showed how women are discriminated against under society. In the end she set aside the expulsion citing various judgements and her rationale for the same and asked the matron to take the student back and also asked the student to not humiliate the teacher or warden and she be allowed to use phone in any way she feels fit as far as she doesn’t create any disturbance to other students.

Observations – It opens up several questions which are part of society’s issues even today and probably for sometime.

a. I have been part of quite a few workshops where while I was supposed to share about GNU/Linux, more often than not I ended up sharing about how to use web access rather than advanced technologies. In this I found women to be more backward and take more time to understand and use the concepts than men. Whether it is due to just access issues or larger societal reasons ( the hidden alleged misuse of web) I just don’t know. While I do wish we could do more I don’t have any solutions.

b. As correctly pointed by Honorable Justice Asha, if a women who is pursuing B.Ed. it would harm the career of the young woman. I would opine and put one step more, wouldn’t it also be endangering her proteges, her students from getting a better teacher who is able to guide her students to the best of her ability. As we all know, rightly or wrongly almost all information is available on the net. The role of the teacher or guide is not to show information but probably more as to how to inquire and interpret information in different ways.

Kashmir

In light of the above judgement would not the same principles apply to Kashmir. There are two points shared by various people who are in favor of the lockdown. The first is National Security, National Interest and the second is Kashmiri Pandits. Let us take them one by one –

a. National Interest or/and National Security – I find this reason porous on many grounds. This Govt. is ruled by one of the richest political parties that India ever has. Without divulging further, there is such a huge range of hardware and software for the Government to surveil. With AFSA in-place and all sorts of technologies available off-the-shelf to surveil on residents that argument looks weak. Further, the Minister’s statement tells that the issue is not security of the state but something else. Of course the majoratian view is that they deserve it because they are muslims. If this is not hate, I dunno what is. A person on twitter did a social experiment where a daughter and a mother had the same conflict. The daughter’s view is that it is not right, the mother’s view being the opposite. The daughter disallowed the mother any contact with her, her husband and her daughter for 2 weeks, the mother was in tears. Then how can you think of people being blocked for 2 months.

Another variation of the argument is that militants will come and kill. Now I find it hard to believe that even after having half a million soldiers in the valley they still feel miitants can do something and they cannot. I find it a little hard to digest. There has been news now that the Taliban are involved. If this is true then they have troubled U.S. also, so if one of the most powerful armies on the earth can be stale-mated for what 19 years, are we going to put Kashmiris in lockdown for 19 years ? In fact the prejudcial face can be seen even more at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXWZnnD6JFY-

Kashmiri Pandits – There is no doubt that there was a mass exodus of Kashmiri Hindus from the valley. Nobody disputes that. But just like the process followed in NRC, whether rightly or wrongly couldn’t the Kashmiri Pandits be sent back home. I would argue this is the best time. You have a huge contigent of forces in the valley, you can start the process, get the documents, get them back into the valley, otherwise this will continue to be something like Palestine is in Israel which has continued to an issue for both Israelis and Palestinians with no end in sight. The idea that Pakistan will not harass or do something in Kashmir in fool’s paradise. They have been doing it since 90’s, for that to have a huge population blocked from communicating is nothing but harassment. And hate will never get you anywhere. While this is more greyer than I am making it out, feel free to read this interview as well as the series called The Family Man which I found to be pretty truthful as to the greyishness of the situation out there. While most of the mainstream media gave it an average score, I found it thought-provoking. The fact is mainstream media in India no longer questions the Government excesses. Some people do and they are often targeted. I do hope to share the banking scenario and a sort of mini-banking crisis soon. Till later.