Plays of the day (from Reuters)

This is the Reuters News Agency's tech. newsletter I received only a few minutes ago. All that I read within seemed very good, and too long to post as my "status" on Facebook or as a tweet, so here.

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Hewlett-Packard is close to a deal to buy software company Autonomy for $10 billion and will announce a long-rumored spinoff of its PC division.

Autonomy, which counts Procter & Gamble among a long list of major corporate customers that use its software to search and organize unstructured data like emails, confirmed it was in talks with HP.

Google+, which has picked up more than 25 million users since launching in June, is headed down the right path and is the first serious challenge to Facebook's dominance.

Google's infant social network, which counts Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a member, has met skepticism so far but some venture capitalists see reason to be optimistic.

Speaking of Facebook, the social networking giant has won access to computers, files and emails it hopes will prove an upstate New York man's claim to own half of Zuckerberg's stake in the company is a fraud.

At issue is the authenticity of an alleged 2003 contract under which Paul Ceglia said he hired Zuckerberg, then a Harvard University freshman, to work on StreetFax.com, a street-mapping website intended for the insurance industry.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is close to rolling out its own music streaming service that will work across its mobile devices.

The new service is likely part of an attempt by RIM to beef up its BlackBerry Messenger service as it seeks to compete with the mobile media platform strengths of rival Apple and of Google''s Android.

Are governments inching ever closer to the some form of censorship of social media?

British Prime Minister David Cameron has flirted with the idea after recent riots and Western democracies and emerging authoritarian states alike, the temptation to try and regain control through censorship may grow.

As governments draw up strategies for cyberspace they face fundamental questions about the power and limits of the state.

Finally, Blippar has developed a smart phone application which detects the shape of chocolate bars and other objects and converts them into virtual experiences.

Untitled, 04062011

I'm looking through a hole in the sky
I'm seeing nowhere through the eyes of a lie
I'm getting closer to the end of the line
I'm living easy where the sun doesn't shine

I'm living in a room without any view
I'm living free because the rent's never due
The synonyms of all the things that I've said
Are just the riddles that are built in my head

I'm seeing the stars that disappear in the sun
The shooting's easy if you've got the right gun
And even though I'm sitting waiting for miles
I don't believe there's any future in cars

I've watched the dogs of war enjoying their feast
I've seen the western world go down in the east
The food of love became the greed of our time
But now we're living on the profits of crime

- Hole in the sky!

On Ambition

The purpose of ambition lurks behind a crudely fashioned mask of perseverance, resilience and desire; while it is none of them, what it is has been a matter of conjecture owing, more so than not, to the passage of time. Ambition, as far as I am concerned, is a pointer, and ambitious are those in whose service it points always forward. However, before it is contended that such a definition does naught to fulfil such expectations of itself as a designator of an individual's scholastic or industrial position, ambitiousness, I would implore, is a state of mind that has never once been proffered for invocation but is realized as, rather to be, the intended or inadvertent presence of certain traits in certain measures, i.e. will of mind to push and pull, strength of heart to sustain and forbear, and acuity of intellect to beguile and deter. Ambition, therefore, is the truth of direction assured the truth of such an assemblage and not, contrary to what it is regrettably believed to be, any one of the two.

Ambition reserves unto itself a certain qualifying dignity; had it not, then there would be no ambitious fools.

Alive.
Or something to that effect.

The Regrettable Stupefaction Of Dr. Manmohan Singh

Only after the 2G scam did I learn how many zeroes there are to numbers aptly called "lakh-crores". The impact of the fiasco didn't really drive home until I listened to my grandfather's woes last night. Its one thing to worry about the country's future in the telecommunications sector when frequencies are allotted and licenses sold for such massive, albeit insufficient, amounts are all canceled, but it's another to know that a parliamentarian (of A. Raja's calibre) who is paid Rs. 56,000 per month finds it insufficient. That's the bottom line at the end of the day.

I don't know what Kapil Sibal or Manmohan Singh are doing either. For being a more progressive lot, they seem to be forgetting their basics, only making it easier for the BJP to hem them in. Of course, the Auditor General (AG) and Dr. Subramaniam Swamy are achieving that by themselves, the latter with added political gains. First, the scam: fine, it's happened, now hand over A. Raja to the CBI's custody so the matter can be sorted out. But no, Sibal is instituted as the interim telecom minister - a move that immediately inculpates Raja in the public eye. Next, Sibal announces a press meet and claims that Raja did nothing wrong, that there was no loss to the govt. India. That's mistake #2: defying the comptroller and auditor general of India (CAG) so blatantly without providing any proof in his defense. As if this wasn't enough, Manmohan Singh, who I used to think was smart, appoints P. J. Thomas as the CVC. Was that defiance of the BJP's disapproval in light of his culpability in the Palmolein oil scam? If so, bad move. Or was that a matter of taking the law into his own hands - again a defiance of the Supreme Court's pending judgment on the same case? Again, if so, bad move.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Dr. Manmohan Singh"][/caption]

And now, Dr. Singh releases a statement claiming he and P. Chidambaram (who, together with Sushma Swaraj, constituted the committee that decided to appoint Thomas as the CVC in September, 2010) agreed on the appointment while Ms. Swaraj, from the BJP, disagreed. Agreement or disagreement is not the prerogative of the commonwealth; if there was a case pending judgment against the name of the CVC - of all the people - then its ineffectiveness in influencing the decision of his promotion reflects poorly on the Prime Minister, the ruling party and, ultimately, the state of the nation.

On Nativity And Belonging

I undertook a wild trip of Chennai today – I know it sounds grandiloquent when I say that, but I took a trip that was definitely wild on my own terms. My first discovery was that not only had I seen just half the city, but was also under the false impression that there was nothing more to it. My blatantly wrong assumption was quashed fully when I went past Chennai Central (as we know the Central Railway Station) and arrived in that part of the city called, simply, the North. The peoples in other parts of the city – the parts familiar to me – were all immigrants, and had been naturalized over the course of three centuries to make up everything that was cosmopolitan about the state capital. The natives were in the North, unconsciously preserving as well as relishing all that was and is Tamil – the language, the food, the sunrise, the sunset and everything in between.

As we (me and my magnanimous friend, known only as V) drove hither and thither, him pointing out to me all that had changed in the last four years, forgetting that I had known quite nothing of Chennai so much as two years ago, while I told him of all the quaint remnants of the British occupation that I had noticed and researched. V was the quintessential free spirit, the praxis of freedom, while I preferred the sequestered and sound-proofed confines of a room with a view. We each had known Chennai as two distinctly different entities for the last few years: I had known it for the city it was, the residue of its history and no more, while he knew it was a living, breathing being. He would tell me about his experiences with the people he had met, their sufferings they had recounted to him, and the struggles they faced on a daily basis that, in his mind, seemed to define the state of being Tamil. You only had to listen to him speak, and you knew it was true.

That V could find so much nativity in him would sometimes put me to shame. Let alone being a free spirit, I have never even appreciated the outdoors; call it selfish, call it what you will, but my interests have always been with facts, with the physics and the mathematics of this world, and anything under their purview would soon come to be under my purview. All that I have ever known about this city, this beautiful city, is, sadly, only a result of such observations; then again, I have only observed, I have never surrendered my expectations to the promises of the city and seen. What I write today about the Marina beach may seem original because I have been there – but I know, even if you can’t discern it, that there is nothing that prevents me from substituting the word ‘Marina’ with the name of some other beach in some other continent and still be left with a sensible description. There is no qualitative content that I am capable of contributing with, and that is what leaves me ashamed.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Marina"][/caption]

At the same time, my logical faculties – faithful as they always are – tell me that all is not lost, that there is still something left in me to give to the city, something it might unfortunately lack, something it might circumstantially need. It is true that this world has always vacillated from states of imperfection to perfection, and it is also true that it can never peacefully exist in the same state. I may not know the pulse of the city, but that only means I am endowed with the unfortunate capability to know and, moreover, understand what is perfect and what is not. In other words, I am the logical faculty of the city. Note that I speak only in singular and first-person terms: I am only contextualizing my role in terms of my emotions. Even in all this shame and defacement, there is an urgent need in me to contribute to an entity I have always only indirectly known, an entity, when not an area on the map, that is the port I set my bearings toward when I am lost in the stormy seas of identity and individuality. I am not trying to get rid of my guilt – I know that only because as soon as the guilt is gone, I will still be its humble servant.