Baba Amte :"भिती असते तिथे प्रीति नसते"

Born in Wardha ,Maharashtra ,in 1914 a self made man true to the Gandhian ideals,he accepted the life of a labourer instead of being called land lord for 450 acres of land.He might not be a "Baba"of worshiping but certainly "Guru" for future generations.


Moved towards Vinoba Bhave for its Gandhian philosophy during freedom struggle Murlidhar Devdas Amte learned Bengali to comprihend Tagore's "Geetanjali" to understand pain across all languages.In 1942 Baba took Sadhna tai and family at a new place at Anandvan where service was not provided to the leprosy patients but by the leprosy patients to thousands of visitors and guests.


Baba Amte what he was called because of his inspiration to the People of Punjab in terbulent years of 1984 to 1986 and than he stayed with the masses to strengthen them at the banks of Narmada for a decade to selfless help in the fight against foolish Sardarsarovar dam project.


Baba was physically unwell during his later days due to Spondylosis,in 2007 ,he was diagnosed with Leukemia .On 9th February 2008 Baba Amte breathed his last breath and was buried instead of cremated as per his last wish.Opon Amte's death the 14th Dalai Lama said "Amte's demise is a great loss to all of us.I am an admirer of Baba.I vividly remember my visit to his thriving community of handicapped people at Anandvan in 1990".


Baba Amte was awarded with neumores awards and titles Gandhi had conferred on Amte the title Abhayasadhak for his fight against leprosy .Indian government with 

• Padma Shree, 1971
• Padma Vibhushan, 1986
• Gandhi Peace Prize, 1999 and many more by other institutions .

Dream come true.

The duskey sky in the evening stopped to drink in the beautiful skies the sunset had created.Last few months back  a friend and I walked along the edge of a hilltop forest while a wild wind rushed through the trees and I wondered if the whole wood would blow away. And then, just a day later, we walked through a hilly terrene  where the softly falling rain made the earth smell sweet.


The trees stood quiet and still, large droplets splashed to the ground from the leaves or trickled down the bark, darkening the trunks .The beauty of rain ,the isolated patch of our farm near the town with hilly terrane and streams running sideways with huge ,tall,witthered tree trunks around tempt to hug .it’s like entering another world under the dusky evening skys.


The moon and sun both tussling for their space in the space with twinkles awaiting for there glare the roudy clouds with a lightning blade now and than bring my friend closer to me .The cool breeze with tiny droplets and husk around .I always wanted to be a part of it and today it was the dream come true for me .

Truth and lie !

"Truth always triumphs" the meaning for "Satyamev jayte " which we use to see after almost all the movies ended in the last decayed on doordarshan every Sunday before the 8:45 news .Even in the court scenes there were Satyamev jayte " written behind the judge and even in Ramayana and other epics truth was glorified. We were reminded by our parents to follow it ,saying at last the person who doesn't leave truth and right path leads good life and he is remembered forever.


Now after a decade ,does all those things lost there flair ? as we see almost everyone climbing up the ladder of success through dishonest means .Even the study conducted by University of San Francisco says only 31 people out of 13000 could identify in nearly all cases when someone was lying .People who lie react differently when they lie so there is no set pattern. They can feel afraid, guilt or excitement while lying, it really depends on the person.


So in a age of quick money and using one's shoulder to climb to the top the borderline between telling the truth and lying is something that is hard to come  with even at a young age.The thrill and excitement of telling a lie also sometimes tempt a person to tell a lie for no reason .


Telling a lie and telling a truth both are just telling a sentence but truth has a contentment in it whereas a lie bring a guilt and bad consequences with it so it is only the person who speak and the moment the word or sentence is uttered have the right and responsibility for it .

Oye lucky, lucky oye !

He gets out of his Merc wearing a red sports jacket .The car was parked in the parking area of the hotel with its front facing the gate .He comes out and enquired about room which he wanted to hire for an hour for wash and change .

The rate was quoted and negotiated .An identity proof was asked for and the driving licence was handed over but with in a second it was replaced with voter's card .Than the voter's card of Mr Devendra singh son of Kirpal Singh was scanned thru the scanner and saved with other visitors cards which are mandatory these days after the  Mumbai Blasts .

My wife who was sitting in the lawn watching the whole episode approached me and alerted saying he is Bunty the burglar who was recently seen in a realty show Big boss .I called up one of my friend and asked him to surf about the person and he tipped saying my wife was right .

Meanwhile the so called guest asked for a bottle of mineral water and was looking for his cloths in his car .I went to the car and asked if he was the same person who appeared in Bigg boss and his tone changed saying he was an undercover agent and worked for Interpol he also took out a file and said he wanted to buy some marble and Blah blah blah .He seemed too weired and I was convinced by his behaviour that he was some whom my wife was suspecting so i asked him to pose with me for a photo and he refused saying the Interpol stuff !!!

I thus refused for the room to him but coincidentally was able to scan his identity proof .yet another mistake I anticipated at the right moment because of my better half.

MGNREGA and Rajasthan

Once nominated as the best state for implementation of MGNREGA, Rajasthan has now gone down the chart in the implementation of the flagship scheme of the UPA government. In fact, the irony is that the state got the laurels for the scheme under the Vasundhara Raje government and its fall has come under a Congress government.He argued that the JCB was not an innocent machine but a precursor to big corporate giants eyeing the NREGA’s vast funds. “Mind you, the minute corporates come in, NREGA goes out,”In Rajasthan alone, an estimated Rs. 9,500 crore were spent on NREGA in 2009, making the programme lucrative for big corporates. If they came in, the NREGA would cease to be a wage employment programme.


Prima facie it all seemed too good to be true. As a hack remarked, the selfless MKSS activists, the earnest Collector, a government that would go the extra mile to facilitate the audit, all recalled a 1970s feel-good Doordarshan documentary more than real-time India with its conflicts and confrontations.Behind the impressive grand finale was a history of struggle for accountability in public spending. In a lot of places, the records had to be wrested from reluctant panchayat officials. There were also showdowns between the sarpanchs and the auditors at many of the jan sunwais held on the penultimate day.The sarpanch-villager collusion worked like this: The sarpanch and his acolytes would hire the JCB machine to cut down time and labour, yet fudge the record books to show full employment and extended periods of work, thus earning huge sums of money for no labour at all. Obviously, the conspiracy excluded the bulk of the workers in whose names the wages were drawn.


 In Taswaria, the village heads insisted on being spared punishment for wrongdoings, unmindful of the presence of Minister Bharat Singh.The social auditors confronted irregularities almost everywhere, and these went well beyond the expected complaints around delayed and stalled payment of wages. Job cards, required by law to be in the beneficiaries’ possession, were routinely withheld by the panchayat staff, resulting in NREGA workers not being able to claim what they earned. NREGA is premised on simple transparency, an example being the use of village walls to display work and payment details so that these become public knowledge. Yet the auditors repeatedly found fake muster rolls, bare walls and misplaced job cards. The material used in construction work was substandard and record books showed inflated figures against usage.


The roadblocks that the  social audit teams faced cannot however detract from the achievements of the exercise, which for the first time ever united two sections conventionally at loggerheads: civil society and government.And obviously the irregularities we witnessed  were nothing compared to the situation  where NREGA was struggling to get off the ground.    “Yes, there are irregularities but I would think these form a small proportion of NREGA work. More to the point, through years of struggle we have institutionalised a system of transparency which ensures against big scams.We have shown that given political will, resistance can be beaten down.”

Utterly Butterly Delicious Story

                    
India has the largest cattle population in the world ,it has overtaken the US and is now the largest producer of milk in the world.The first Amul cooperative was the result of a farmers' meeting in Samarkha (Kaira district, Gujarat) on 4th January 1946 
The vision was to organise farmers, to have them gain control over production, procurement and marketing by entrusting the task of managing these to qualified professionals, thereby eliminating the middle men, the bane in farmers' prosperity.Dr. Verghese Kurien , "The father of the white revolution" in India is credited with architecting Operation Flood , the largest dairy development program in the world. He set up the Anand model of cooperative dairy development, engineered the White Revolution in India, and made India the largest milk producer in the world.

Born on 26th November 1921, Dr.Kurien graduated with Physics from Loyola College, Madras in 1940 and then did B.E.(Mech) from the Madras University. After passing out of the University, he joined the Tata Steel Technical Institute, Jamshedpur from where he graduated in 1946. 
He then went to USA on a government scholarship to do his Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan State University. When he came back to India, he was posted as a Dairy Engineer at the government creamery, Anand, in May 1949.


Around the same time, the infant cooperative dairy, Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union Limited (KDCMPUL),  now famous as The AMUL Dairy was fighting a battle with the Polson Dairy which was privately owned. Young Kurien, fed up with being at the government creamery which held no challenge, volunteered to help Shri Tribhuvandas Patel, the Chairman of KDCMPUL, to set up a processing plant. This marked the birth of AMUL and the rest is history.Dr. Kurien has since then built this organization into one of the largest and most successful institutions in India. The Amul pattern of cooperatives had been so successful that Dr. Kurien setup NDDB (National Dairy Development Board) to replicate it across India.


Kurien and his team were pioneers in inventing the process of making milk powder and condensed milk from buffalo's milk instead of cow's milk. This was the reason Amul became so successful and competed well against Nestle who only used cow milk to make powder and condensed milk. In India buffalo milk was the main raw material unlike Europe where cow milk is abundant.Kurien, plays a key role in many other organizations, ranging from chairing the Viksit Bharat Foundation, a body set up by the President of India to chairman of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand's (IRMA) Board of Governors in India. Kurien was mentioned by the Ashoka foundation (www.ashoka.ca) as one of the eminent present Day Social Entrepreneurs.

For his contribution to the dairy industry Dr. Kurien has received top awards not only in India but also overseas.

Padmashri (1965) Padmabhushan (1966) Krishi Ratna Award (1986) by the President of India. Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership (1963) Wateler Peace Prize Award of Carnegie Foundation (1986) World Food Prize Award (1989) International Person of the Year(1993) by the World Dairy Expo, Madison, Wisconsin, USA. Padma Vibhushan (1999)

Swami ji

Narendra nath was what he was called when he was a kid.If there is one personality who is an inspiration to every youth of this land, it was undoubtedly him.Millions and millions have been influenced by his life and his noble mission such was his karizma .
 He was a very active and naughty child who was good in academics and co-curricular activities. He loved music and learnt the vocal and instrumental music during his childhood. He learnt and practiced meditation since his childhood. He was against superstitions and the differentiation made on the caste, creed and religion. He was a child who believed in sacrifice and renunciation and would give up anything that he had if someone asked for it. He respected sanyasis a lot.
Once Narendra arrived at Dakshineshwar and posed a question to Sri Ramakrishana Paramhansa. He asked him about his encounter with god and whether he had actually seen him. Ramakrishna immediately replied, Yes, I have seen God, just as I see you, the difference is that I have seen him in a much clear way. The man’s words depicted honesty and the depth of experience that left Narendra puzzled. He then decided to accept Sri Ramakrishna as his guru but decided to conduct a test on him.
Narendra decided to have a journey across India and travelled many places. This was the time when he acquired the name SwamI Vivekananda. The Maharaja of Khetri named him as Vivekananda.  During his journey he witnessed the discrimination that prevailed in the society and realized the need for a national rejuvenation in India. When he reached the southernmost tip of India at Kanyakumari on 24^th Dec 1892 he meditated on a rock after swimming across the sea. This rock is known as Vivekananda  Memorial or Vivekananda Rock.
Swami Vivekananda had to attend a conference of World Religion in Chicago, America in the year 1893. He addressed the conference as “Sisters and Brothers of America” that attracted a lot of applause. His oratory skills fascinated everyone and he explained about the Indian culture. He won the hearts of millions who became his disciples and his famous disciple was Margaret Nivedita who settled in IndiaIn 1897 he returned to India and was spreading awareness among the masses through spiritual tools. On 4^th July 1902, he breathe his last at Belur Mutt, Calcutta.