"Why are all the people he looked after being punished?"

This man is Dr Binayak Sen, a top notch doctor from CMC, Vellore. He has spent THREE DECADES giving high class medical care to the villagers of Bhagram Nalla & Dalli Rajhara in Chattisgarh. For the past one year,however, Dr Sen is in a jail in Raipur,accused of being a Naxalite supporter & messenger . A doctor who has delivered results far beyond the National Malaria Eradication Program, singlehandedly, has been imprisoned for the last one year. I do not know if the charges pressed against him are true or not, what I am unable to understand is why is Dr Binayak not being allowed to serve the villagers? Has the state government, in the last one year, been able to replicate Dr Sen's medical services in the villages of Bhagram Nalla & Dalli rajhara? No. The pertinent question here is (and I quote) "When you set up base in a rural area it's because you have a certain faith in the system. How do rural doctors retain that faith, after what has happened to Binayak Sen?"

You can read more Dr Binayak Sen here and here. You can also register a formal protest against his imprisonment here.

Washout at Kotla

KKR is out now. Hope its a better season next year

Idiocy of western world thinking

Its almost like fixing a square peg into a round hole. Get $100 laptops for underprivileged children. Make it open source, robust and kids in India & Africa will start learning! I am talking of the much fabled OLPC XO.What Mr Negroponte missed is a basic insight that in most of emerging markets, the underpriviliged see their children as ADDITIONAL RESOURCE to generate income, and pull out kids from school, or do not send them at all, forget giving them a laptop to learn. Why? Because they face the daily struggle of managing two meals a day.

The Indian Government runs a welfare scheme called Mid day scheme. The scheme uses free meals to draw kids to school. Parents do not object because children get one meal for free, and children get basic education. 120 million children have been covered under this scheme so far. It works for everyone: the parents, the children, the Government.

Mr Negroponte should look at scaleable solutions like the mid day meal scheme, instead of ivory tower thinking on the lines of OLPC. Funnily enough, OLPC has embraced MS Windows platform and hence will now cost $200! A good wite-up here

English : passport to success

English is aspirational, English is the passport to better jobs. It is so evident when you travel to smaller towns and villages and hear youngsters speak. This report reinforces my field experiences as a structured data source

The lord of my generation of fiction

Lord Jeffrey Archer kicks off his india tour . My first book reading session

He can read

Thats your neighbourhood rickshaw walla reading the day's newspaper . Have we under estimated him ?