ctrl.altered.mind

A letter from Ryan Bodanyi, Coordinator, Students for Bhopal :

Some of you may have heard of Dow’s “Hu” or “Human Element” campaign; some of you may not. It’s a $30 million effort to make people believe that Dow cares deeply about the people that it’s killing. You can see it for yourself, if you haven’t already in the pages of Time or National Geographic. Thanks to YouTube, you can also watch it for yourself – Dow produced an extravagant 90-second commercial (most commercials are 30 seconds) to promote its new public relations campaign.

Is Dow having trouble coming to terms with its identity? Absolutely not – it’s been a cold-blooded killer for years, all over the world. Instead, this ad campaign is the cold and calculating product of Dow’s effort to continue killing without consequence. Killing with consequence is far less profitable, and Dow is nothing if not profitable. In 2005, Dow enjoyed revenues of $46 billion and profits – profits alone, mind you – of $4.5 billion. $30 million seems a small price to pay to hide the bodies.

Yet the bodies continue to accumulate in Bhopal and elsewhere, as Dow steadfastly refuses to spend anything to clean up its killing fields. $30 million to make you forget the lives Dow isn’t saving with those same dollars.
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A few weeks back, the tech community forums were abuzz with the news about Kerala, India’s most literate state, having chalked out a plan to migrate all of its high school students to open source platforms over the next three years. While the computer market in India harbors its own sub-industry of software piracy, the prime reason for this is the fact that bloated software prices have been taking a toll on most consumer budgets. It is, after all, hard to justify paying a price for intangible software that rivals the cost of the hardware itself. The good news about the planned move to open source software, is the fact that budgets of educational institutions would not be blasted out of proportion by high licensing and technical support fees. The savings could be applied towards purchasing additional hardware (as an example, the Cotton Hill Girls High School in the southern city of Tiruvananthapuram has 4000 students and just 21 computers).

On slashdot today, slashchris84 mentions a BusinessWeek article about the growing role of Linux in the classrooms of India.

Amidst the sea of comments, those of humphrm (18130) particularly stand out:

There is another angle, though. Maybe you dismiss it, but to some India is one of the hottest technical development centers in the world. And this is a country that highly values education and generally does a better job of providing it to even it’s poorest constituents than the “Developed Countries”. Having just returned from Hyderabad, I witnessed kids crawling out of what could only be described by a Westerner as a mud hut, with a sparkling clean and pressed school uniform on, ready to go to school. In America, these kids would probably not qualify for most public schools because they don’t have an address.

Then, they go on to higher education… and guess what schools are being built fast in India? Technical schools. Lots of them.

My point is, your “backwater” country is doing a better job of educating it’s masses than most western countries, and the tools that these kids learn today will shape technology tomorrow.

Mike pointed me to this NPR report (audio) on the centennial year of India’s favorite national song, Vande Mataram. The song was written as a rallying call for independence from Britain. But since its inception, the Hindu-inspired lyrics have fueled a debate about whether the song ignores India’s large Muslim population.

Vande Mataram has a special place in our hearts - so much so that some have even expressed the desire for it to be redesignated as India’s National Anthem, replacing Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana. While I believe this is a ludicrous idea, as are the controversies that even circulate on the Internet these days about Jana Gana Mana being inappropriate since it was written in praise of England’s King George V that would be sung on the occasion of his coronation ceremony.

While Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Vande Mataram has a clear historical and cultural significance in that it glorifies the Motherland and was the national cry for freedom from British oppression during the freedom movement, it is the focal point of an age-old controversy that has been refreshed today in the light of the move to introduce the song in school assemblies across the nation. The controversy arises due to the fact that Muslims, India’s largest minority, are restricted by their faith to sing the song, as Islam requires its followers to sing praises to only one God - and therefore, the Motherland cannot be glorified to the position of God in prose or verse. Quoting Wikipedia:

“… The song was also rejected on the grounds that Muslims felt offended by its depiction of the nation as Ma Durga—a Hindu goddess— thus equating the nation with the Hindu conception of shakti, divine feminine dynamic force; and by its origin as part of Anandamatha, a novel they felt had an anti-Muslim message.”

The NPR report concludes on a note that depicts the strength in India’s secularity - by mentioning A R Rehman’s rendition of Vande Mataram, a song that gained immense popularity independent of religious affiliations, across the nation.