The Living Dead

 

del.icio.us Tags: politics,history,statues,children,india

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My sister and her family spent a couple of days with me recently and this was one of the discussions I had with her about her 4 year old son.

As 4 year olds go, my nephew has tons of questions for my sister and brother-in-law. Some times its easy to answer his questions, and some times its pain to come up with some reasonably sounding answers. This blog is about one such question.

We were passing in front of statues of freedom fighters, poets, and other historical figures. My nephew asked my sister. Who are these people, whose statues are erected along the street we were passing. Aruna, my sister told him that, the statues of the people who had done good work and of great importance. Almost all the names of those statues were unfamiliar for my 4 year old nephew Pandu. His next question was, do those people live inside those statues? Aruna said, no, there are all dead. The statues are a way to honor their memory.

Pandu's next question was, does this mean, statues are erected only for people who are dead? Now Aruna was in dilemma. If she says Yes, then that will be not correct.

• UP CM Mayawati to install more of her statues - Zee News
• Kanshiram wanted my statues beside his: Mayawati - Express India News Article 
• Mayawati’s statue pulled down for being too ‘small’ - The Hindu
• Lucknow will get more statues of Mayawati - Rediff News
• UP govt to install 3 more Maya statues - Times of India News Item
• Mayawati pulls down her own statue, finds it too small - Times of India
• Mayawati to put up more of her statues
• Mayawati to put up more of her statues - Hindustan Times
• Mayawati to put up more of her statues - MSN News
• New statue of India's Dalit icon - BBC News
• In pictures: Mayawati's favorite statue-maker - BBC News

Read these articles to know the depravity the politicians can stoop to. Now how do you tell a 4 year old child, that, there are people who are "Living Dead". Erect statues for themselves.

Quote of the Day:

In this world, it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
--Henry Ward Beecher

The Moral Instinct - New York Times

Today I happened to read an article on, yes "Morals" on New York Times. It's an interesting article. A topic which has bothered me for a long time.

Is it not possible to be a good human without believing in God? If it is within us to be good or evil, then what place our world has for religions and sermons and sects and the denominations?




The Moral Instinct - New York Times

What do we teach our children?

In Hyderabad, India (which is true in other cities too), I keep seeing one recurring scene on the roads. Parents talking the children to the schools or bringing them back to home, on two wheelers (Bikes/Scooters/Scotterets/Mopeds etc).

It's very endearing scene as well as disturbing at the same time. Most of the parents, are subconsciously, are teaching their children to break the law, rules by breaking themselves.

Driving on wrong side of the road, taking shortcuts, driving without concerns to other commuter's convenience, over loading their bikes (I have seen 4-5 kids being ferried to the school by some brave hearts).

Children are very impressionable and they learn exactly what they see.

Do these parents care about the education they are giving their children?

Parents need to be good examples to their children.

Its a pity, these parents do not realize that they are the first teachers of their children.

Read this beautiful article/discussion A Parent's Realization: "I am my child's first teacher!"
See this Video

Children Learn From Parents


CHILDREN LEARN WHAT THEY LIVE!

CHILDREN LEARN WHAT THEY LIVE!

Helping Your Child Learn Responsible Behavior with activities for children

Children 'learn violence from parents'

Children learn from watching parents

Web Resources

I came across this wonderful compilation of web resource for any blogger or web master.

Eco Design Blog » 101 Design resource sites

Technorati Tags: resources, web, blogging

Online Publishing.

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del.icio.us Tags: documents,online publishing,publishing,e-doc,e-books,googe books,tutorials,user generated content

Recently I was searching online for tutorials on drawing and information about the human body proportions, especially of different races and ethnicity. I was in particular interested in casual drawing, which I can import into Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. I stumbled on a wonderful site called Scribd. Its a wonderful site where users can create documents and upload, typically tutorials technical documents, which they think help people world wide.

The system supports various document types, some of them are:

• Adobe Postscript
• Adobe PDF
• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft PPT
• Microsoft Excel
• Open Office (All document types)
• Text (Plain ASCII)
• and images (of various types)

I was able to download some tutorials about drawing and manga style drawing in no time. There is of course, a limit to the number of documents you can download per day, to prevent overloading the Scribd server by greedy pigs like me :) I am sure this great site will, come up with a premium account soon, if they don't have yet. There is not limit at least for online viewing though.

The registration is a breeze, and the site is pretty well organized. Still, I would have preferred more categories than already present. I am sure, they will come in due course of time.

The beauty of this site is, it has user generated content/documents for sharing. It scores over Google Books, as it allows the users to download the content to their desktops, unlike Google.

If you are looking for documents of any type, which can be downloaded for your leisurely reading, Scribd is your best bet.

You can view the documents in a very intuitive User Interface and I like very much the Book View the tool provides. Makes you feel, you are thumbing through a book. You can go full screen as well. The documents are converted to Flash and rendered on the browser. You do not require any particular document tools like word, acrobat or open office to be installed on your system. Just Flash Plug-in for your browser.