Low intensity or not, would just condemning the terror attacks suffice? There has to be some serious rethinking of how media portrays acts like these, how we as people react to it and how much of it we remember enough to do something about it. What strikes blatantly though is how devastation and death becomes just the content for News Channels and withers away in the memory of the public.

25 minutes past the lunch hour. There is a long standing queue up to the gate. Three employees of the bank who were supposed to get into the cash counters are engrossed in a gossip, loud enough for everyone to hear. Over the helpless crowd, the lovely notice board says, "Welcome to the Corporation Bank of India".

It isn't much of trouble when switching languages while typing. All it needs is a toggle that after sometime becomes quite instinctive for the mind, not that easier though it seems when it comes to switching the languages while speaking.

Well, at least for me it has not been easier. Everyday I interact with so many people in Kannada that switching back to English sometimes gets me staggering.

So, I got around to sketch this today:

This is for an article that questions the prudence of State Government's decision to allocate funds for providing free Electricity to Farmers in this year's budget.

The first Member-Secretary of the Government of India's Central Pollution Control Board, former head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at IIT Kanpur, a PhD from University of California, Berkeley. But Dr. G. D. Agarwal seems to be better known as the simple man, "The Scientist and Rishi".

He is now on an aajeeva upavaasa satyagraha (fast-unto-death) to save Bhageerathi from destruction in the name of development.

Writes Ravi Chopra in a blog post at IWP:

Pained by the unrelenting destruction of the Ganga river, especially by a series of dams in its upper reaches, Dr Agrawal has decided to go on a fast-unto-death to oppose its continuing desecration. His conviction that we are staring at an unprecedented ecological and cultural catastrophe comes from his powerfully logical mind. Critique on proposed dams on Bhagirathi River.

Read the rest of the article.

Oh, and almost forgot! If you are a Kannadiga, read the article posted about this on Kannada Water Portal.

Indian Express reports that one more person has been arrested for his posts on Orkut.

The Pune police on Saturday arrested one more person for posting derogatory content about Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi on an orkut community.

The Cyber Crime Cell had contacted the authorities of Google Company seeking details about the persons who posted offensive message about the Congress chief on an orkut community named "I hate Sonia Gandhi."

It was known that some offensive messages were posted using an email nithin.sajja@gmail.com. Investigations revealed that email id belonged to Nithin Sajja of Hyderabad.

(rest of the article)

Let us just hope that they've got the IPs right this time. The last time they did this, a wrong person was held in a shabby prison for 50 days!

It was a surprise news that almost ended up being short of a shocker. While Unicode is being adapted increasingly world-wide, our Karnataka Government seems to be heading the other way. The state government issued a notification earlier this week for a possibility of a 'bi-lingual font' for Kannada script.

The worry is not the weird idea insisting on a requirement of bi-lingual font (since we already have multi-lingual fonts in Unicode), it is the state government's decision to stick around with the old encoding in ASCII. While the encoding format is not well supported anywhere else other than the Nudi software (which is distributed as a freeware by the state government), it is definitely not path for the future.