Electronic banking gone kaput

If there was ever a place that needed its information organized and universally accessible, it is India. Bank transfers in India need IFS codes - they are like bank routing numbers in the US. For years the only way you could get the IFS code was walk up to the branch and ask a specific person. Things have changed since then, but even now only private banks go to the effort of mapping a bank branch to its IFS code so that we don't have to remember it. Thats not the end of it though.. the mapping is horrendous. If you aren't already confused by IFS codes for a single bank location, cryptic acronyms for names will.

I finally found this page today and it has a much better, and likely authoritative listing of banks in India that participate in electronic funds transfers. Hope it makes someone else's life easier.

in reference to: Reserve Bank of India (view on Google Sidewiki)

progression

I started listening to World Vision podcasts this week. First of all, the stories are amazing. The reasons kids, especially girls can't go to school are unbelievable. But the most moving stories were those where moms/dads did whatever they could to make their children's lives better even as they remained deprived. That is perhaps the most human of all things.

We have a better life than our parents because they wanted us to do better and spent most of their adult life making that possible. It is now our turn.

in reference to: http://media.worldvision.org/rss/wvus_podcast.xml (view on Google Sidewiki)

Managing email notifications in Facebook sucks

So I want to shut facebook from sending me emails.

The link in the footer of each email send me to a page which has a single checkbox - checked - enabling all notifications from facebook. Click on it and submit, the page just refreshes with the check box enabled again. Wonderful.

Fuming, I go to the page that manages all notifications, there are a 100 checkboxes for each event in Facebook, and not a single button to enable/disable them at once.

in reference to: Facebook | My Account (view on Google Sidewiki)

Harder than life

It was truly moving to watch a person decide to end his life consciously. Most people take objection to assisted suicide for religion. Some go as far as to say its "not being brave", as they did in the case of Craig Ewert (see the comments).

While they are entitled to their opinion they are being callous in judging Craig. To me he is braver than anyone else; more than a terminally ill person who chooses to live through the pain. Death leaves deep scars on the living. It is hard enough having to live without someone loved, I cannot imagine how much more harder it would be to have watched them die after prolonged suffering.

I did not hear about this man before today. However, even I am able to appreciate his life because he did not let his death mar its memory.

I am immensely grateful to his family for sharing his story.

in reference to: FRONTLINE: the suicide tourist | PBS (view on Google Sidewiki)

On water

I have seen first hand the booming market of underground water pumps in Indian cities. Every apartment complex built has its own "bore well" as the underwater pumps are called; indeed in most places they are not used as drinking water even by the locals.

Regulation wouldn't help, since the lack of enforcement would just cultivate a black market.

Education won't do much either: this article points to small successful experiments in villages where crop choices are based on ground-water levels, and food grown is used for local consumption instead of being sold; thats a good direction for villages if there is wider adoption of the model. It would also be a boost for sustained farming which is definitely much needed in India. In cities though, it isn't like people don't know about the state of ground-water levels; they just don't care as much. Water supply infrastructure by local governments being as lamentable as it is, city dwellers have few other choices.

The model that might just work is water recycling and rain-water harvesting. There is really so much "real estate" in urban india where rain water could be collected; if every apartment block had a collection mechanism on its roof top in addition to the omnipresent "over-head water tank", that could create a dent. Water wastage is less of a problem than it is in cities in the developed world.

But these are small solutions for a large problem. We have alternative energy projects now; water unfortunately has no alternative!

in reference to: A special report on water: Making farmers matter | The Economist (view on Google Sidewiki)

Howard Zinn

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/27/howard-zinn-dead-author-o_n_439350.html

Howard Zinn died of a heart attack yesterday at the age of 87. I never saw him in person but he profoundly impacted my view of our times, our world. I may not have agreed with everything he said, but everything he said and wrote made me pause and think.

It is fitting to quote from his speech from 2005 at Spelman College which had fired him back in 1963.

My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself -- whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist -- you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.

A different take on free markets

Raj Patel: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

Raj Patel talks about the west exporting free markets as if "they are the natural houses of liberty ad freedom." He quotes a very interesting thought experiment from Jerry Cohen

Imagine a world where everyone is given little tickets and on those tickets are freedoms or rights; say the right to visit your ailing aunt, drive a red sports car, the right to good health insurance. You don't have to use those tickets, but you cannot exercise a right unless you own a ticket that says it. In the world we live in, Jerry Cohen suggests, those tickets are replaced by dollar bills. In a free market, the more money we have, the more rights we have.

Freedom therefore, is a function of wealth. This is a very astute observation and is indeed the model that the modern day communist party in China has discovered. You can setup a free market and not offer political rights.

Some other interesting points:

• If african american women in the United States were a country, their mortality rates would be worse than Uzbekistan.


• There are systems of development and models of governance in developing countries that are much more sustainable than those that are advocated by free markets.


• We need to recognize that we are not consumers of democracy, but its citizens.

More on Fora TV.

Contractors in US wars

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=122444062

Nice interview. 

<head scratching fact>

The US govt covers the cost of insuring employees of private contractors in war-zones and also reimburses the insurance company if the employee is injured and needs medical attention.

</head scratching fact>

Why we'll never see the end of it

Look closely at the picture of this 23 year old who's now sitting in a prison somewhere in Detroit. It is tough, but stop thinking for a moment what he tried to do which would have ruined 100's of families had he succeeded. Instead, think about him and any other kid in Detroit or any other place in this country, where a 23 year old got caught up in drugs, became part of an armed robbery, or worse, went into a school with a gun on a shooting spree. It just takes a couple of such incidents for us to start blaming the neighborhoods, schools, internet, or whatever else it is in the society that is causing young people to go astray. No one says, "hey lets bomb the living daylights out of the neighborhood where this guy grew up", or lets get rid of the mayor of the city, the governor of the state, or government of the country.

No one pauses and wonders about the enormity or the roots of a problem that can skew the basic sense of right and wrong in every impressionable 23-year-old to such an extent. He has done this, therefore he is evil, and so is every other person who comes from where he came from or looks like him.

It is a social problem when someone amongst us harms us, it is terrorism when someone from another country harms us. Hence by definition, we will never think of a social remedy for the problem we call terrorism. Which may really be the only way to look at it if it ever can be solved.