Habits die hard!
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This news report really makes a disturbing reading!
The existence of a form of neo-slavery in the U.S has been detected by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and the Washington D.C.-based, anti-slavery group Free the Slaves.
The report, “Hidden Slaves: Forced Labor in the United States”, describes for the first time the nature and scope of modern-day slavery in America. The report further adds that Forced labor occurs in at least 90 cities across the United States, and at any given time, 10,000 or more people are forced to toil in sweat shops, clean homes, labor on farms, or work as prostitutes or strippers.
The following are a few of the cases that have been documented :
- a Berkeley, Calif., businessman enslaved young girls and women for sex and to work in his restaurant;
- a Florida employer threatened violence to force hundreds of Mexican and Guatemalan workers to harvest fruit;
- two couples in Washington, D.C. brought Cameroonian teenagers to the United States with the promise of a better education and then forced them to work 14 hours a day as domestic servants, without pay and under the threat of deportation.
Appalling news indeed!
Victims of forced labor are trafficked into the United States from at least 38 different countries, with China, Mexico and Vietnam topping the list. Some are born in the United States and later held captive, the study adds.
The new study documents how modern slavery operates in the United States. Perpetrators use a range of crimes - fraud, coercion, physical and psychological violence - to hold their victims captive. They confiscate passports and threaten to turn their captives over to the authorities if they refuse to obey. In some cases, perpetrators and their associates threaten or physically attack the families of victims in their home countries.
Victims may be verbally abused, beaten or sexually assaulted by their captors.
Even if victims can escape, they often fear leaving because they do not speak English, are unfamiliar with U.S. currency, and are unsure of how to use local transport. In a strange land, victims can grow dependent on their captors, if only to survive.
Copies of the “Hidden Slaves” report will be available online at:
www.hrcberkeley.org/ and
www.freetheslaves.net
Don’t rush the child.
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“We want children to grow up really fast, and as adults we want to be the children we never were.”
This brilliant observation vividly depicts the malady that has afflicted the parental approach to rearing up children.
Parents and teachers try to “rush” the kids to grow up fast. In the process the children lose the bliss of childhood! It is something that you could never “rewind” to get back to!!
So goes an article by Annalisa Barbieri that appeared in The Guardian.
A child’s life nowadays has been made more stressful than that of adults. There is so much of peer pressure, competition, symbolism and snobbery that the charm of enjoying the pleasures of being a child is totally lost in this kind of bourgeois rigmarole, until these children “grow up” and realise that they don’t want to!
Barbieri has raised many pertinent queries:
“For whose benefit is all this rushing?
Is it any wonder that when we are supposed to magically turn into adults we think:
Hang on a minute, I just wannahavvalittlefun?
And what better way to have fun - and spite those parents who tried to turn you into mini-adults too early - than to base yourself in the family home, with little responsibility and a laundry service.
It is a pity that great many parents don’t know how to play anymore with their own offspring. They’re too competitive, don’t let their children take risks, or use their imagination.”
High time we let the child savour the ecstasy of being a child and acting like one, and not “fast-forwarding” to become what they are not.
Frustables…!
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I came across the term “frustables” from an article by the renowned Thamizh writer Sujatha. It means “unanswerable imponderables” coined by David Feldman in his series of books on Imponderables
Some of the brain-itching questions that are expertly scratched by the author in lighthearted short-take responses in his books are:
- Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?
- Do Penguins Have Knees?
- How do astronauts scratch an itch?
- Why do you so often see one shoe lying on the side of the road?
- What happens to your Social Security number when you die?
- What that white stuff is on bubble gum?
- When do fish sleep?
- What are you hearing when you shake a lightbulb?
You are sure to find that figuring out these little silly tidbits is quite fun, entertaining and illuminating.
But there are still many frustrating frustables yet to be answered in our life!!
Flock of freshers!
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They never had it so good!
This age of the “freshers” has arrived!!
Earlier a typical Catch22 situation prevailed where you need to have at least 2 years’ experience to get a job; but you need an employment to gather that experience in the first place!
But look at the scenerio that obtains now! IT majors (as well as wannabes) sprint to the Engineering colleges of all hues with a wide fishing net and trawl all would-be grads and MCA’s, put them before the neo-idiot box and start harvesting the greenbacks from the goldmine of BPO!
Some pessimists muse about the inevitable “bubble burst” calling the present boom too good to be true in the long run!
Nevertheless, the oven-fresh techies fully armed with their CV (Powered by Ctrl+C and driven by Ctrl+V) are having a swell time with placement letters showering on them the k’s of their dreams!
Hey, wait a minute. The story doesn’t end with the engineers. The humanities and science grads too have hopped into the call-centre bandwagon and roll in crispy best and some!
The doctrine of negation!
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It has become a fashion to negate the advantages of technology by taking a nihilistic attitude as part of “negative snobbery”! The main idea is an attempt to stand out in the crowd by crying hoarse on all established effects of emerging technologies.
Latest to join in this chorus is a senior technocrat and an alumnus of IIT, Prof. Kalyana Krishnan who has derided the very IT which has brought him to what he is now, by declaring that IT is not a harbinger of progress in this story.
I feel that it is high time such hipocracy must stop. These people use the very technogy they criticise in the process. The tangible progress made by technology can’t be wished away or reversed.
- What about computerised train reservation in Indian Railways?
- The on-line booking of tickets in buses, trains and airlines?
- Results of exams on the internet
- Instant billing in the departmental stores
- Ubiquitous use of mobile phones in rural areas
- IP phones in telephone kiosks
- On line auction and matrimonials
The list is endless!
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A computer for $15!
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Bob had written about this fantasy in 2001. It was the story of a company called Rolltronics which is trying to re-discover the “Wafer Scale Integration” and perfect the technology to essentially print the whole computer on thin plastic and sell it for a mere $15 apiece!
Imagine the revolutionary PC in the form of a magazine - printed the same way a newspaper gets printed. Though Bob prophesied that the dream, dirt-cheap PC which will be the next big thing to happen in the technology era, will fructify in 2006, it appears the 15 crumpled greenbacks residing in my piggybank have to wait longer! Perhaps the folks at Rolltronics are still dotting the I’s on the ways to adapt the roll-to-roll printing to the production of amorphous semiconductors on plastic films. But they are about to roll out another cool gadget - a wafer thin display using a technology called “FASwitch” (Flexible Array Switch). Imagine an HDTV you take home under your arm in a cardboard tube and attach to your wall with thumbtacks or tape.
Bob is all agog with the possibilities that the new technology can unfold. Imagine billboards that could not just be changed at will, but that could also include video, since the FASwitches can cycle at up to 200 HZ, which is plenty fast enough for any computer gamer.
We in India, who have become very much “gadget-hungry”, will really get thrilled with the new toy. But will it not be pretty pricey ultimately, with all duties, taxes and levies, not to speak of the other imponderables!
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Toe-licking!
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A bizarre episode has been reported in today’s newspaper about a Dutchman who snuck up on women sunning themselves in Rotterdam’s parks and beaches and began to lick their toes (unsolicited!). But authorities could not prosecute him since there is no law specifically against toe-licking!
It is also reported that the man with a taste for female toes had been indulging himself on this sport for quite some time. But why this unorthodox taste? If you try to Google for it, you’ll land up with hundreds and thousands of web sites on this phenomenon called “Foot Fetish”, an aberration bordering on perversion wherein a dude savours female feet including toes, arch, sole and heels. The images you would see depicting handling, fondling, licking, kicking, trampling and suckling would make them fall into the genre of pornography.
But the fact remains that there are innumerable members of the species who suffer (!) from this mental aberration, if the number of postings in discussion forums, groups and Orkut communities is any indication.
But do they really like to be cured of it?
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I am S.K!
Ok, what's the big deal, you may ask! But you may miss a good deal if you do not dwell deep into this web site, specially hand-crafted for you. But what about me, the person? Wait, I am not good at making things up. If you stumble upon a good-sounding résumé, please pass it on to me!
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