Republic Day Talk to Fellow Residents at Mantri Pride, Jayanagar, Bangalore, Jan 26, 2010

I wish to use this occasion to speak for a few minutes on some thoughts for us as an enlightened community. We have the education and resources that the average Indian may not have even in 2030. So, it is natural that we should aspire to act in a way that shows our sense of responsibility and culture. This day calls for such thinking.

We are so lucky – with a stadium and a big swimming pool nearby, not counting the small one close to Mantri Garden. We have Lal Bagh. We also have the Madhavan Park with a set of great trees that can be the envy of anyone living in the concrete jungles of Navi Mumbai or Noida. Can we do something as a community to preserve these treasures? For instance, can we prevent our end of the Madhavan Park from looking like a dump? Yes, we can. We can also prevent the gardeners from burning dried up leaves and dead branches and, thereby, reduce pollution. We can protect the great rain tree that stands in the little triangle on our way out to the Madhavan Park circle. We can do some shramdan to make that triangle look a little better.

On a more general note, we can get corporators and the local MLA to visit the building once in a while and meet us a community. We can give them one of those fine breakfasts that the Committee organizes for our own meetings. We need the elected representatives of the city to ensure that this area will not be allowed to run down.

Lastly there is one more point I wish to make. As an enlightened community, we can lead the city in reducing dirty and dangerous work for our fellow men. You would have seen three men on the garbage truck every morning, meticulously separating the garbage into multiple piles – plastic bags, glass items, metal items, kitchen waste and so on. Once in a while there will be broken glass and medical waste mixed up with all these. Can’t we separate our garbage into recyclables and biodegradable waste? We are all proud of the way this building collects recyclable paper and donates it to FAME. We were happy to see when garbage bags with different colors were distributed to enable separation of waste. It was a good attempt. If it did not work, we need not give up the effort; we can find a way that works. Let us separate recyclable material from our garbage. Let us show we care.

Thank you for listening.
Ramani

Finding reliable information about government announcements and policies

This is largely a copy of a post in my other blog - Science and Technology Projects for Student Research. I re-post it here because it has relevance beyond science and technology. It is a matter of public interest – how do people find out reliable information about government announcements and policies.

The history of search engines has been a most exciting one. The development of effective search techniques will ultimately get ranked with the invention of printed books. These two, along with the development of the Internet, have made it possible for knowledge of human society to be made widely available among its members, but don’t get carried away! We have got a long way to go. The search problem shares something with the halting problem, at least in practical terms. If you spend time on searching for something, a good fraction of the time you come away with the information you wanted, but you never come away saying that the information you searched for is not there! You go away frustrated, feeling that searching is often a never-ending business. At least in terms of a human lifetime!
I had this feeling last week, searching for the information a friend abroad had asked me. He plans to visit India, SriLanka and Nepal on an Indian multiple entry visa. Someone has told him that if you enter India with that kind of visa and go to any other country, say Nepal, you need to stay out of India for at least 60 days before you re-enter India. I helped get a definitive answer to this by searching the Web for relevant information. It seems that the Government had announced this rule in Dec ’09 and later relaxed it in some way. I redoubled my effort to get a definitive answer to my friend. Can I get a reliable source’s final answer to this question? I searched the Web in different ways and then asked a renowned travel agency and sent email to an agency to which the Indian consulate outsources part of its visa application processing. The more I searched the more confused I got with contradictory information.
Why do I write this? I would like you to try and find the answer. You may be lucky in finding an answer that appears to be conclusive and reliable. Or you may not. Suppose you do find an answer that appears to be conclusive and reliable. How sure are you going to be about that answer?
Do try this experiment. You may not have a friend with this problem. But you may get good ideas on what more needs to be done to help people searching for information, particularly when they do not have the benefit of a professional in the field who knows where to look for information and what to trust.

Srinivasan Ramani