THE 'SAVE KERALA' INITIATIVE

THE 'SAVE KERALA' INITIATIVE

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Its A Dog's World!

A million reasons why you should never post your picture on the web, especially on sites such as orkut or facebook, unless you have locked them from public viewing! This probably includes even matrimonial sites and also emailing photographs to people you are not really familiar with. There are frustrated psychopaths who seem to be bent on collecting pictures of women and pooling them on sites, some of which are extremelty obscene and others that are titled like "Desi girls .." and "Beautiful..Non-nude Gals!". And I am talking about pictures of girls and women picked from their personal albums, school albums, family photos, friends, etc.

Today it could be a random face, tomorrow it could be your friend or relative!

I dont know if the authorities are incapacitated enough not to intervene and raid server locations where these pictures are hosted, even if they are outside India or within. I hope someone who has both sense and power (a rare combination I suppose!) is reading this and has the courage and ability to do something.

I think privacy is something we all take too lightly, especially in Kerala where we are least bothered about respecting someone else's privacy!. Although this message is not really about Kerala, but rather its because I got really angry seeing such pics. The link to one such site was sent to me by a friend, whose colleague's pictures were put on the site - the picture was taken from her personal online album. They are trying to contact authorities regarding this, but none seem interested to do anything concrete. Most of the related sites on these domains are pornographic and disgusting.

I think this also underscores the fact that we really have no sense of respect or concern for our women. I have to point out that this is true especially of men in Kerala, where a lot of instances and events point to the fact that women are being treated more as objects rather than human beings, and a large section of the population thrives on scandals and gossips, which in turn feed this sort of deplorable perversions. Disgusting as it is, posting these pictures of innocent girls and women on these sites takes ourselves to new lows!

Pray someone can do something about this!


P.S. Initially I posted the links to some of these sites, but on second thought I decided to remove these, since it would mean more publicity to the pics of these innocent victims. But if you are someone who can do something about this whole scam, please post a comment and I will contact you and give you the details of these sites
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Saturday, February 02, 2008

Literacy versus Education


The first thing that people tend to query you about when you say that you are from Kerala is about the 100% literacy concept which has been given so much of publicity, that now its become a bane - Kerala gets the least priority for most developmental projects because people sitting in other parts of the country think that its such an advanced state that does not need any help.

But everyday life in Kerala (you just need to spend a few hours in fact) tells you a different story - the story about how literacy is so vastly different from education. There are many parallels you can draw to prove this. For one, you could say most of our political leaders are only literate, but not at all educated. Or you could argue that reading and writing your own name is literacy, but reading and writing someone else's name is education. I could say that one can drive if you are literate, but disciplined driving needs education. Treating your mother and sister well needs literacy, but treating someone elses mother and sister like your own needs education. There are many more examples I can think of..but..you could also simply look around and wonder what the difference is..



Pic courtesy - Cosmet Surgeon via email

I am not sure if the above signage is located in Kerala or elsewhere, but it was too hilarious and one couldnt drive home the point any better.

Lets just hope our schools and colleges start focussing on education rather than initiate our youth into politics. I hope we soon have a government with the sense and knowledge to understand the value of education, than just gloat on the literacy tag, and hopefully will have the courage to ban political affiliations in schools and colleges of Kerala. Or soon we will be a state with a 100% uneducated tag.

I would like to add that the message here is not the picture (which was just to add some fun), but the fact is that Kerala's much acclaimed education and development models have stagnated to a pathetic extent over the last 10-15 years, and is nothing to be proud of any more.
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