INR Vs USD

Indian Rupees to 1 USD (April 2007)

Excerpts from the article in 2005 here:

Now, we can argue for days and weeks about how severe the dollar decline will be, how high interest rates will go, what impact that will have on the US economy and, by extension on the global economy. The bottom line is that China will most likely allow its currency to rise this year; Japan will follow suit. That is the same as saying the dollar will continue to decline only this time against the Asian currencies as opposed to the euro and other Western currencies. And, as you saw, the decline in the dollar will occur simultaneously with rising US interest rates.

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Pulitzer Winner Photo by Kevin Carter, 1994

Source: Wikipedia:

In March 1993 Carter made a trip to southern Sudan with intentions of documenting the local rebel movement. However, upon arriving and witnessing the horror of the famine, Carter began to take photographs of starving victims. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, wherein a seemingly well-fed vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn't. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the girl:"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." [2] The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown. On April 2, 1994 Nancy Buirski, a foreign New York Times picture editor, phoned Carter to inform him he had won the most coveted prize for photography. Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on May 23, 1994 at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library.He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened and helped the child. Journalists at the time were supposedly warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. This criticism and the death of a close friend, Ken Oosterbroek, who was accidentally shot and killed in Tokoza on April 18, 1994 while covering township violence, may have contributed to Carter's tragic suicide. On July 27, 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit river, near the Field and Study Center, an area he used to play at as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. The last person to see Carter alive was Oosterbroek's widow, Monica. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky." [3]

Source: Wikipedia

Rest of the world

A worldwide survey was conducted by the! UN. The only question asked was:

*"Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?" *

The survey was a huge failure, In Africa they didn't know what 'food' meant, In India they didn't know what ' honest ' meant, In Europe they didn't know what 'shortage' meant, In China they didn't know what 'opinion' meant, In the Middle East they didn't know what 'solution' meant, In South America they didn't know what 'please' meant, And in the USA they didn't know what 'the rest of the world ' meant.

Sudoku Fever

Sudoku fever has caught up once again. Last time I was doing Sudoku, I took 4 min 34 sec on an easy one and my rank was top 26%, and after a lof of gap in between, I again did the easy sudoku and tool 4:43 Sec. and this time my rank was down to top 34%. Man, I gotaa beat that!!

I play online at http://www.websudoku.com

NELE

http://www.nele.org.in/



Recently, AID-TAMU funded a project called NELE.



This child is one of thousands of homeless children who live in our cities with no place to sleep and no food to eat many a times. One day they might fall into the hands of anti-social elements and become a threat to society. Shouldn’t we prevent it ? Nearly 80,000 such children live in Bangalore alone.

In our country, the number of such children is increasing daily. As responsible citizens, there is definitely a lot we can do for them. We could step in and embrace these children and help them lead a life we dream for ourselves. These children, too, are citizens of our society and could contribute to the progress and glory of our land if given an opportunity. This is the rationale behind NELE.

More information about NELE can be found at http://www.nele.org.in/

AID-TAMU Slide Show

In one of my previous blogs, I had mentioned about the AID-TAMU fund/fun raiser activity. Below are some of the volunteers, and you can clearly see how much fun they are having.

The Irony

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants

An Article by Michael Pollan, appeared in NY Times Mag.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I'm tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I'll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won't kill you, though it's better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you're much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That's what I mean by the recommendation to eat ''food.'' Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Read full article here.