Link to the below article in Internet is here
HAVANA (AP) -- Only a month has passed since ordinary Cubans won the right to own computers, and the government still keeps a rigid grip on Internet access.
But that hasn't stopped thousands from finding their way into cyberspace. And a daring few post candid blogs about life in the communist-run country that have garnered international audiences.
Yoani Sanchez writes the "Generacion Y" blog and gets more than a million hits a month, mostly from abroad - though she has begun to strike a chord in Cuba. On her site and others, anonymous Cubans offer stinging criticisms of their government.
But it isn't simple. To post her blog, Sanchez dresses like a tourist and slips into Havana hotels with Web access for foreigners. It costs about $6 an hour and she can't afford to stay long given the price and the possibility someone might catch her connecting without permission.
It's a testament to the ingenuity and black-market prowess Cubans have developed living on salaries averaging $20 a month, with constant restrictions and shortages.
The connections Cuban bloggers are making with the outside world via the Internet are irreversible, said Sanchez, who this month won the Ortega y Gasset Prize for digital journalism, a top Spanish media award.
"With each step we take in that direction, it's harder for the government to push us back," she said.
On an island where many censor themselves to avoid trouble, Sanchez says Generacion Y holds nothing back.
"It's about how I live," she said. "I think that technically, there are no limits. I have talked about things like Fidel Castro, and you know how taboo that can be."
But she added that "there are some ethical limits. I would never call for violence, for instance."
Since taking over from his ailing brother Fidel in February, Raul Castro has lifted bans on Cubans buying consumer electronics, having cell phones and staying in luxury tourist hotels.
While the changes have bolstered the new president's popularity, most simply legalized what was common practice. In a typically frank recent posting, Sanchez noted that many Cubans already had PCs, cell phones and DVD players bought on the black market.
"Legally recognizing what were already facts prospering in the shadows is not the same as allowing or approving something," she wrote. Cuba's leaders are responding to the inevitable, "but they won't soothe our hunger for change."
Authorities have made no sustained effort to stop Sanchez's year-old blog, though pro-government sites accuse her of taking money from opposition groups.
Only foreigners and some government employees and academics are allowed Internet accounts and these are administered by the state.
Ordinary Cubans can join an island-wide network that allows them to send and receive international e-mail. Lines are long at youth clubs, post offices and the few Internet cafes that provide access, but the rest of the Web is blocked - a control far stricter than even China's or Saudi Arabia's.
Still, thousands of Cubans pay about $40 a month for black market dial-up Internet accounts bought through third parties overseas or stolen from foreign providers. Or they use passwords from authorized Cuban government accounts that hackers swipe or buy from corrupt officials.
Sanchez said so many Cubans read her blog that fans stop her on the street.
Generacion Y takes its title from a Cuban passion for names beginning in Y. It offers witty and biting accounts of Cubans' everyday struggles against government restrictions at every turn.
Some of the bloggers hew to the belief that openness is the best answer to official surveillance.
"By signing your name, giving your opinions out loud and not hiding anything, we disarm their efforts to watch us," Sanchez wrote on her blog.
On a blog called "Sin EVAsion" ("Without Evasion"), Eva Hernandez dared to mock "Granma," the official Communist Party newspaper, for taking its name from the American yacht that brought Castro and his rebels back to Cuba from Mexico to launch their armed rebellion in 1956.
"Cuba is the only country in the world whose principal newspaper, the official organ of the Communist Party and the official voice of the government, has the ridiculous name 'granny,'" she wrote. Piling on the heat, she added that the name "perpetuates the memory of that yacht that brought us so much that is bad."
Generacion Y is maintained by a server in Germany, and Sanchez says the Cuban government periodically attempts to block her site within Cuba, though the problem is always cleared up within hours.
Administrators of the "Petrosalvaje" site also claim to struggle with government-imposed limits. A recent post called uncensored Internet access a "virtual raft" - a reference to the rafts on which Cubans flee to the United States.
The government is also into blogging - maintaining dozens of sites dedicated to promoting the island's image overseas.
"Raul needs time," reads a post on Kaosenlared.net, a forum based in Spain. "We are confident, calm and staying united in favor of the direction of our revolution." It is signed Rogelio Sarforat and was apparently posted from Cuba.
Reynaldo Escobar, Sanchez' husband and a former journalist for official media, now uses his own blog to criticize the government. He said Cuba pays supporters to flood the Internet with positive opinions.
He says he knows of nobody who would spend money to go on the Web and defend the system. "Everyone who argues in favor of the government is paid to do so, or does so because they have been asked to," he said.
---
On the Net:
Generacion Y: http://www.desdecuba.com/generaciony/
My Island at Midday: http://isla12pm.blogspot.com )
Potro Salvaje: http://www.desdecuba.com/potro/
Monday, April 28, 2008
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Aurangazeb & Secularism
A News by Deccan Chronicle
But NO ONE stopped M.F.Hussian from painting Hindu Gods nude
Long Live Secularism(?!!!!!)
Visit : FACT
But NO ONE stopped M.F.Hussian from painting Hindu Gods nude
Long Live Secularism(?!!!!!)
Visit : FACT
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
A Chronicle of facts
This is a post to chronicle some facts :
Not many know the Indian past he had discovered!
Written by
Gurumurthy
"What is it that keeps the country down", asked the speaker. A young
man in the audience replied unhesitatingly: "Undoubtedly the
institution of caste that kept the majority low castes and the
society backward" and added "it continues".
The speaker replied, "May be". But, pausing for a moment, he
added, "May not be". Shocked, the young man angrily asked him to
explain his "may-not-be" theory.
The speaker calmly mentioned just one fact that clinched the debate.
He said, "Before the British rule in India, over two-thirds - yes,
two-thirds - of the Indian kings belonged to what is today known as
the Other Backward Castes (OBCs).
"It is the British," he said, "who robbed the OBCs - the ruling class
running all socio-economic institutions - of their power, wealth and
status." So it was not the upper caste which usurped the OBCs of
their due position in the society?
The speaker's assertion that it was not so was founded on his study -
unbelievably painstaking study for years and decades in the archives
in India , England and Germany. He could not be maligned as
a 'saffron' ideologue and what he said could not be dismissed thus.
He was Dharampal, a Gandhian in ceaseless search of truth like his
preceptor Gandhi himself was, but a Gandhian with a difference. He
ran no ashram on state aid to do 'Gandhigiri' .
Admitting that "he and those like him do not know much about our own
society", the young man who questioned Dharampal - Banwari is his
name - became his student. By meticulous research of the British
sources over decades, Dharampal demolished the myth that India was
backward educationally or economically when the British entered.
Citing the Christian missionary William Adam's report on indigenous
education in Bengal and Bihar in 1835 and 1838, Dharampal established
that at that time there were 100,000 schools in Bengal, one school
for about 500 boys; that the indigenous medical system that included
inoculation against small-pox.
He also proved by reference to other materials that Adam's record
was 'no legend'. He relied on Sir Thomas Munroe's report to the
Governor at about the same time to prove similar statistics about
schools in Madras. He also found that the education system in the
Punjab during the Maharaja Ranjit Singh's rule was equally extensive.
He estimated that the literary rate in India before the British was
higher than that in England.
Citing British public records he established, on the contrary,
that 'British had no tradition of education or scholarship or
philosophy from 16th to early 18th century, despite Shakespeare,
Bacon, Milton, Newton, etc'. Till then education and scholarship in
the UK was limited to select elite. He cited Alexander Walker's Note
on Indian education to assert that it was the monitorial system of
education borrowed from India that helped Britain to improve, in
later years, school attendance which was just 40, 000, yes just that,
in 1792. He then compared the educated people's levels in India and
England around 1800. The population of Madras Presidency then was 125
lakhs and that of England in 1811 was 95 lakhs. Dharampal found that
during 1822-25 the number of those in ordinary schools in Madras
Presidency was around 1.5 lakhs and this was after great decay under
a century of British intervention.
As against this, the number attending schools in England was half -
yes just half - of Madras Presidency's, namely a mere 75,000. And
here to with more than half of it attending only Sunday schools for 2-
3 hours! Dharampal also established that in Britain 'elementary
system of education at people's level remained unknown commodity'
till about 1800! Again he exploded the popularly held belief that
most of those attending schools must have belonged to the upper
castes particularly Brahmins and, again with reference to the British
records, proved that the truth was the other way round.
During 1822-25 the share of the Brahmin students in the indigenous
schools in Tamil-speaking areas accounted for 13 per cent in South
Arcot to some 23 per cent in Madras while the backward castes
accounted for 70 per cent in Salem and Tirunelveli and 84 per cent in
South Arcot .
The situation was almost similar in Malayalam, Oriya and Kannada-
speaking areas, with the backward castes dominating the schools in
absolute numbers. Only in the Telugu-speaking areas the share of the
Brahmins was higher and varied from 24 to 46 per cent. Dharampal's
work proved Mahatma Gandhi's statement at Chatham House in London on
October 20, 1931 that " India today is more illiterate than it was
fifty or hundred years ago" completely right.
Not many know of Dharampal or of his work because they have still not
heard of the Indian past he had discovered. After, long after,
Dharampal had established that pre-British India was not backward a
Harvard University Research in the year 2005 (India's
Deindustrialisation in the 18th and 19th Centuries by David
Clingingsmith and Jeffrey G Williamson) among others affirmed
that "while India produced about 25 percent of world industrial
output in 1750, this figure had fallen to only 2 percent by 1900."
The Harvard University Economic Research also established that the
Industrial employment in India also declined from about 30 to 8.5 per
cent between 1809-13 and 1900, thus turning the Indian society
backward.
PS: This great warrior who established the truth - the truth that was
least known - that India was not backward when the British came, but
became backward only after they came, is no more. He passed away two
weeks ago on October 26, 2006, at Sevagram at Warda.
Not many know the Indian past he had discovered!
Written by
Gurumurthy
"What is it that keeps the country down", asked the speaker. A young
man in the audience replied unhesitatingly: "Undoubtedly the
institution of caste that kept the majority low castes and the
society backward" and added "it continues".
The speaker replied, "May be". But, pausing for a moment, he
added, "May not be". Shocked, the young man angrily asked him to
explain his "may-not-be" theory.
The speaker calmly mentioned just one fact that clinched the debate.
He said, "Before the British rule in India, over two-thirds - yes,
two-thirds - of the Indian kings belonged to what is today known as
the Other Backward Castes (OBCs).
"It is the British," he said, "who robbed the OBCs - the ruling class
running all socio-economic institutions - of their power, wealth and
status." So it was not the upper caste which usurped the OBCs of
their due position in the society?
The speaker's assertion that it was not so was founded on his study -
unbelievably painstaking study for years and decades in the archives
in India , England and Germany. He could not be maligned as
a 'saffron' ideologue and what he said could not be dismissed thus.
He was Dharampal, a Gandhian in ceaseless search of truth like his
preceptor Gandhi himself was, but a Gandhian with a difference. He
ran no ashram on state aid to do 'Gandhigiri' .
Admitting that "he and those like him do not know much about our own
society", the young man who questioned Dharampal - Banwari is his
name - became his student. By meticulous research of the British
sources over decades, Dharampal demolished the myth that India was
backward educationally or economically when the British entered.
Citing the Christian missionary William Adam's report on indigenous
education in Bengal and Bihar in 1835 and 1838, Dharampal established
that at that time there were 100,000 schools in Bengal, one school
for about 500 boys; that the indigenous medical system that included
inoculation against small-pox.
He also proved by reference to other materials that Adam's record
was 'no legend'. He relied on Sir Thomas Munroe's report to the
Governor at about the same time to prove similar statistics about
schools in Madras. He also found that the education system in the
Punjab during the Maharaja Ranjit Singh's rule was equally extensive.
He estimated that the literary rate in India before the British was
higher than that in England.
Citing British public records he established, on the contrary,
that 'British had no tradition of education or scholarship or
philosophy from 16th to early 18th century, despite Shakespeare,
Bacon, Milton, Newton, etc'. Till then education and scholarship in
the UK was limited to select elite. He cited Alexander Walker's Note
on Indian education to assert that it was the monitorial system of
education borrowed from India that helped Britain to improve, in
later years, school attendance which was just 40, 000, yes just that,
in 1792. He then compared the educated people's levels in India and
England around 1800. The population of Madras Presidency then was 125
lakhs and that of England in 1811 was 95 lakhs. Dharampal found that
during 1822-25 the number of those in ordinary schools in Madras
Presidency was around 1.5 lakhs and this was after great decay under
a century of British intervention.
As against this, the number attending schools in England was half -
yes just half - of Madras Presidency's, namely a mere 75,000. And
here to with more than half of it attending only Sunday schools for 2-
3 hours! Dharampal also established that in Britain 'elementary
system of education at people's level remained unknown commodity'
till about 1800! Again he exploded the popularly held belief that
most of those attending schools must have belonged to the upper
castes particularly Brahmins and, again with reference to the British
records, proved that the truth was the other way round.
During 1822-25 the share of the Brahmin students in the indigenous
schools in Tamil-speaking areas accounted for 13 per cent in South
Arcot to some 23 per cent in Madras while the backward castes
accounted for 70 per cent in Salem and Tirunelveli and 84 per cent in
South Arcot .
The situation was almost similar in Malayalam, Oriya and Kannada-
speaking areas, with the backward castes dominating the schools in
absolute numbers. Only in the Telugu-speaking areas the share of the
Brahmins was higher and varied from 24 to 46 per cent. Dharampal's
work proved Mahatma Gandhi's statement at Chatham House in London on
October 20, 1931 that " India today is more illiterate than it was
fifty or hundred years ago" completely right.
Not many know of Dharampal or of his work because they have still not
heard of the Indian past he had discovered. After, long after,
Dharampal had established that pre-British India was not backward a
Harvard University Research in the year 2005 (India's
Deindustrialisation in the 18th and 19th Centuries by David
Clingingsmith and Jeffrey G Williamson) among others affirmed
that "while India produced about 25 percent of world industrial
output in 1750, this figure had fallen to only 2 percent by 1900."
The Harvard University Economic Research also established that the
Industrial employment in India also declined from about 30 to 8.5 per
cent between 1809-13 and 1900, thus turning the Indian society
backward.
PS: This great warrior who established the truth - the truth that was
least known - that India was not backward when the British came, but
became backward only after they came, is no more. He passed away two
weeks ago on October 26, 2006, at Sevagram at Warda.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Communism?
Communism, as for as I think, is a good
ideology but a tough one to implement.
The basic idea of Communism is
everything should be kept in common
nothing can be owned by a monopoly.
This is a good idea. But the problem
is, the leaders who speak loud in favor of
communism won't be ready to share their
wardrobe with others(Ofcourse, not only
the leaders but all). The problem starts
here.
Moreover, these leaders say that
Communism has a very great future
inspite of Globalization. The reason they
say is, in Globalization the employee
rights are being crushed up so obviously
Communism has its space. I too agree.
But, I feel, again the problem exist. The
today's youth, who they belive, they talk alot in favor of
communism, but the pity thing is their
objective is to pursue an M.B.A. & got
stuck with an MNC. Once they pursue
such a career will they be able to follow
communistic ideologies?
So I end up with the question : Does
communism has a bright future?
ideology but a tough one to implement.
The basic idea of Communism is
everything should be kept in common
nothing can be owned by a monopoly.
This is a good idea. But the problem
is, the leaders who speak loud in favor of
communism won't be ready to share their
wardrobe with others(Ofcourse, not only
the leaders but all). The problem starts
here.
Moreover, these leaders say that
Communism has a very great future
inspite of Globalization. The reason they
say is, in Globalization the employee
rights are being crushed up so obviously
Communism has its space. I too agree.
But, I feel, again the problem exist. The
today's youth, who they belive, they talk alot in favor of
communism, but the pity thing is their
objective is to pursue an M.B.A. & got
stuck with an MNC. Once they pursue
such a career will they be able to follow
communistic ideologies?
So I end up with the question : Does
communism has a bright future?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
