December 6 - Another aniversary of the great day

It has been 13 years since the old structure that stood in place of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya was brought down and a make shift temple was built in its place. So many ups and downs and changes in the history of Bharath since then. Hindus thought that, a grand temple will take shape once BJP government comes in the centre. The BJP govt came, ruled for 6 years and got defeated. We the people, don't know what efforts it did in the direction of temple building!? Till to date, temple is a distant dream. The RSS and VHP had very seriously taken up this issue and made many sacrifices! But BJP took the advantage and came to the centre stage of Indian politics. They utilized people like Uma Bharathi and Sadvi Ritambara to win elections. Today Uma Bharathi is expelled from the party!! The party which was started to cleanse the Indian politics has taken the same path as that of Congress. I don't see any difference between the today's BJP and Congress! Hindus should not depend on these political parties to get their work done. They have to unite behind RSS or VHP and fight for their cause. I feel pained to see that many of my hindu friends still don't understand the issue of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. They talk about secularism when Ayodhya issue comes up. The reason can be that, we read only the news magazines and believe whatever comes in that. Nobody tries to check the facts. Nobody reads history!! I asked my friend, in what way Ayodhya fight is against secularism? He said, you people destroyed the mosque which belongs to Muslims and want to build a Hindu temple in its place. So, I asked him, who is Babar? Why did he destroy the Ram temple? He was in a distant land and for what purpose he came upto Ayodhya? My friend didn't have the answer. He appreciates the fact that Babar is an invader. I also told him that, the muslims of our country are our muslims. They are not descendents of Babar. When somebody invades our country, we should not look at his religion/caste and then decide whether he is an enemy to me or not. So, even though Babar is a muslim, he is an enemy to each and every muslim in this country. He wanted to announce his victory over this country and that's the reason he destroyed the famous temple in Ayodhya. So, it was a black mark in History of Bharath. So, Ayodhya fight is not against muslims or any other caste. But, the politics made it more confusing and our media was always there to add more confusion. All of them made it out that, it is against muslims (thinking that they will get bulk votes of muslims)!! Hope a beautiful Ram Mandir will be built soon. And that muslims understand that they are the children of this soil only and not descendents of Babar.

Churún Merú or ANGEL Falls - World's highest waterfall

In total it is 15 times higher than Niagara Falls with a total of 3212 feet.

In the western part of Canaima National Park, is the Auyantepuy, one of the largest and better known "tepuy" (A flat top mountain ending with vertical walls). Angel Falls - spills from the Auyantepui into what is known as the Devil's canyon 979 Meters below. The indigenous people call it Kerepakupai-merú. It is located in the Guayana highlands, one of five topographical regions of Venezuela. It plunges off the edge of a "tepui", or table-top mountain, and falls to the river below, making it the tallest waterfalls on earth. The waters fall freely some 807 meters (2,648 feet) and reach the bottom of the valley as a misty spray that gathers into a small creek which eventually finds its way into the north-bound Churun River. The original name of this "Highest Waterfall" is Churún Merú or Kerepakupai-merú and is known to the local Indians for a long time. (I really wonder, whether these Indians were influenced by Hindus of India!? 'Meru' is a Sanskrit word for Mountain and som many mountains of India have names ending with Meru) But the rest of the world was not aware of it till 1933! American aviator jimmy angel first saw the falls in 1933 while searching for a valuable ore bed. He returned in 1937 with his wife, Gustavo Heny and Heny's gardener, and landed on top of the tepui. His Falamingo monoplane settled down into the marshy ground atop Auyan-tepui and remained there for 33 years before being lifted out by a helicopter. Jimmy Angel and his three comapnions managed to descend the tepui and make their way back to civilization in 11 days. And since then it has been named after him as "Angel Falls"!

Laptops for $100!!

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, has taken up this project. Although no contracts with governments have been signed, current plans call for producing five to ten million units beginning in late 2006 or early 2007, with tens of millions more a year later. They are aiming to place the laptop in the hands of 100 to 150 million students. Under present plans, the first production version of the laptop will be powered by an AMD microprocessor and use an open-source Linux-based operating system supplied by Red Hat. Open-source software is not patent protected and can be copied for free. To get the price down, an eight-inch diagonal screen -- smaller than standard notebook computers -- will run in two modes, with a high-resolution monochrome mode for word processing and a lower-resolution color mode for Internet surfing. It will be powered by both a power adapter, if electricity is available, or through a wind-up mechanism. The device will have wireless capabilities and can network with other units even without Internet access. Here is the url for the news: http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,120845,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4292854.stm They are planning to have a open source OS and Red Hat is on their mind. Why not Solaris? If anybody who has contacts in MIT can take up this, it will be wonderful news for Sun and Solaris.

-Narendra

Have you ever seen such a small monkey!?

This is a Brazilian Monkey!!

World's highest bridge