One child at a time

• ·                 Ancient cavemen who lived thousands of years ago had no agriculture techniques. They had no fertilizers or pesticides. No satellites or radios to tell them if it's going to rain the next day. They had to find food on a daily basis. They would have constantly worried about finding food the next day. They moved across the land in search of food. 

  Now we have various agriculture techniques. We can farm round the year. We know when will it rain and when will it snow. We know if a cyclone is coming two weeks before. We have various organic and chemical fertilizers. Pests can be controlled. Then why do we still have people who have to find food on a daily basis? Why do children have to move across the land to work for food? What is the use of having everything yet having so many starving people on Earth?

  
  

  India is one the leading countries in the ‘hunger situation’. That itself is a cruel irony as India has 7^th largest land mass in the world. Still we lag behind other countries in basic necessity of humankind. Our children face the same problem people faced thousands of years ago. For our present generation the advances in science and technology mean nothing as long as he is hungry. The socio-political changes will not affect him till his hunger is satisfied. He will not sit and study when he is hungry.

  

  
  

  The ancient nomads settled down when they started farming. And so taking a lesson from this ancient history I suggest we start a small farm with every school. Let the students grow and cultivate locally grown fruits and vegetables. This will provide a constant and non-exhaustible source for meals. Since it is meant for immediate consumption preservatives need not be added.  

   Anything that is extra can be given back to the students only to take it home. They can also sell the extra products and make an additional income. In this way a well maintained farm in a school can make a community self sufficient. Local farmers can come forward to guide the students also. Involvement of more experts in the field will lead to better results. 

  This will also provide the student with a firsthand experience in agriculture. In future also he/she can make their own food in their backyards. 

  Self sufficiency in food is one of the most important steps in development.

  
  

   I am going to #BlogToFeedAChild with Akshaya Patra and BlogAdda.

  
  

  
  

  (Many thanks to fellow blogger and author Dr.Roshan Radhakrishnan for the tag. I was in a long hiatus from the blogosphere but this topic got to me.) 

The virtual dance of democracy

It is said to be the Dance of democracy. There are various superlatives given to our elections. The whole process of election makes the people feel powerful. All the so called powerful leaders will come and ask for the common man’s vote. What they do with the vote is an entirely different question. This time the social media is said to play a major role

 The amount of work these parties put into their online campaigning it would look like the election is going to take place in Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg as the electoral officer or that the election commission will consider the number of retweets and favourites also along with the cast vote.

Yes! XYZ Party gets more likes and hence we have a winner!

My favourite social media of the lot is twitter. I am pretty sure that the creators of twitter would have had one of those friends who just won’t keep quiet. They must have come up with this brilliant idea while talking to her/him.  

Anyways you open twitter now and it is elections all over. Full of trivia which no one really cares about. Major news handles trying to outreach other major news handles by bringing exclusive items about candidates' past and present. When they run out of such highly interesting trivia I am half expecting these people will go to some astrologer to get exclusive breaking news about the candidates’ future also. In fact that is a good idea. Instead of having the experts and political commentators they should have a panel of astrologers, psychics, tarot card readers, Paul the octopus (in spirit of course, which I am sure can be arranged) and have a healthy discussion on the future of the Indian democracy.  

Now things like candidate A wore a t shirt last year in a function which proves him to be an agent of the West or candidate B wore a kurtha pyjama last month which made him regressive and against development are getting momentum in twitter! This will ensure a series of tweets making fun of the said candidates and hordes of people supporting candidates A, B and C, more or less making it a trend. They will have childish twitter fights on how childish it is to fight on twitter. They will profess great ideas about how the country should be run in 140 letters. I mean where did all those ignorant geeks go? What happened to all the good old days when Poonam Pandey could start a trend with a single tweet? (Now even she has to resort to the English premier league) Or how Koffee with karan used to trend with its sheer brilliance! 

 Every day at least two of the top trends now are political in nature. This is setting a bad example to the upcoming generation that wants to join twitter. For them it’ll be a choice between the politically aware pseudo intellectuals of Twitter and the self obsessed ignorant teens and aunties of Facebook. That’s worse than choosing between Modi and Rahul Gandhi. 

I find solace in instagram now. Barring the selfie fever it is a wonderful social network to drool over the food you'll never eat and places you'll never visit. 

The following are some of the statistics I found while researching on this. (By research I meant Google. Isn't that kind of obvious?)

India has

114.8 Million Facebook users  (http://qz.com/150274/india-facebook/ )

33 Million Twitter users (http://www.alltechienews.com/posts/twitter-s-most-active-country-is-china )

A total of 147.8 million users

We have 814 million eligible voters (http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2014/04/03/facts-and-figures-for-the-2014-general-election/)

We also have a population of around 400 million without access to electricity (http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTENERGY2/0,,contentMDK:22855502~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:4114200,00.html )

Around 18 % of the voters are in the social media but a staggering 49 % do not have access to electricity.

 This 18% is widely spread all over the country with probably a high density in the urban areas.

Do we have to politicize the social media also for this? Social networks are probably among the few places left where your religion, location, cast, political leanings don’t really matter. Why not keep it that way?

Do dance along for the democracy.

(Do share this with the pseudo intellectuals, ignorant teens and Google employees) 

Of Half baked dreams - 55 words fiction

The old man placed the dough in the oven. He set the temperature. The girl looked on. After a while she asked if it was ready. He took it out and showed the half baked cake. Dreams are like this only he said. She thought of her half baked dreams with tears in her eyes.