Walk around Mylapore these days and you’ll see a thread like mark in a lot of roads — that’s where Bharti (?) has been laying fiber as part of their broadband push. So far the two buildings in CIT Colony which have the fiber going into them have been a private residence (lucky so-and-so’s, which I was rich enough, etc :-)) and the NDTV office. We‘re still on old-fashioned leased lines :'-(

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JRobb: Subtext: it’s the networks of people that support you and keep you whole after you get old that matter.

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Is there a single News Aggregator out there that supports HTTP User-Authentication (Basic/Digest)? Better still, one that can read IE’s cookies so that it can read intranet weblog feeds as long as an intranet login is valid? This is important because many teams are geographically dispersed (i.e., not on the same LAN/VPN) but still need to share stuff the rest of the world would be better of not knowing about.

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The Times of India says it is now the world’s largest circulated English newspaper. On the other hand, it remains too ad-cluttered and badly written to be called a quality broadsheet in the same sense as the NY Times, Wash Post, LA Times, The Statesman or even that staid old lady of Mount Road, The Hindu (the same is true of the other rag it competes against in the North).

Reading Indian newspapers these days is definitely not a happy experience — budget cuts have led to a reduction in the number of overseas correspondents and an increasing reliance on Reuters, NYTNS and the like. Sport coverage relies heavily on agencies or syndicated columnists. Writing quality (bar The Hindu) is plummeting, and ads are encroaching on more and more column-inches. The Times of India (and India Today, and to a lesser extent the Indian Express and the Hindustan Times), in particular, have become massive — and unabashed — promotion engines for their parent media companies in ways that would make an AOLTW exec wistful.

I wouldn’t gloat if I were working at the ToI — in some ways, it still has a long way to go.

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Now that the X-Files have closed, there’s an opportunity here for desi Chris Carters to get into the act — lots of inspiration here. Anyone remember the monkey man sightings in Delhi last year?

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Ftrain: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

It’s hard to believe Google - which is now the world’s largest single online marketplace - came on the scene only a little more than 8 years ago, back in the days when Amazon and Ebay reigned supreme. So how did Google become the world’s single largest marketplace?

Well worth a read.

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Microsoft discontinues web core font downloads. Reason cited is “EULA abuse”. Of course. Can’t have penguinistas prettying X with it with just an ‘apt-get install msttcorefonts‘ now, can we?

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Thomas Friedman: Where Freedom Reigns. His earlier column, India, Pakistan and GE, was also pretty interesting.

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A lot of people don’t know that India’s national anthem [listen to it (Real)] is but verse one of a five-stanza poem that Tagore wrote c. 1911. I’ve been unable to find the original Bengali version anywhere on the net, but a translation is available here (the translation is correct — the poet’s himself, apparently; the Latinized rendering of the original text is near unreadable unless you have experience reading Bengali with Latin alphabets). Anyone willing to volunteer recordings?

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USS Clueless has a longish article that talks about, among other things, how the American military machine and the Information Economy has this in common today: empowering the line worker, be it an employee or a soldier. One sentence caught my eye:

And it’s just about the opposite of any nations whose traditions derive from monarchy or authoritarianism, where the governing elite do not trust (emphasis mine) those they rule and fear letting them have access to information and fear letting them make decisions.

That was because I had just finished reading this tale of what it took for a man to fly the Indian flag in his own country.

But, in January 1996, the Government of India appealed against this judgment. In its special leave petition to the Supreme Court, the government said the policy to restrict the use of the national flag to the barest minimum was meant to ensure that it was not dishonoured. Jindal, it said, had taken a questionable position by imagining that one of the ways of showing his patriotism and love for the country was to fly the flag. The petition pointed out that there were millions of Indians who were not swayed by a desire to fly the flag in their houses.

And we are supposed to be the largest democracy in the world.

Of course, it’s quite legal now to fly the flag in one’s own house on any occasion, thanks to the Supreme Court clarification. They’ve been selling reasonably well too, though not as well as expected. I suspect the reason is a niggling suspicion on the part of the long suffering Indian — why fly something that can get me into trouble? Do I really want someone to turn my life into bureaucratic hell because someone suspected (or cooked up a case) that I was not flying the flag ‘respectfully’ enough to merit action under the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act 1971? (Though the flag code now clarifies that anyone can fly the flag, it still carries some conditions and provisios intended to safeguard the flags ‘dignity, honour and respect’).

At its frigid bureaucratic heart, inherited from the colonial Brits’ Indian Civil Service, the Indian bureaucracy, 55 years after Independence, does not trust the classes it governs. It still has a ‘we know better’ mentality that is one of our biggest failures ’til today.

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