Prabir Purkayastha
30 Jun 2017
Today, algorithms decide who should get a job, which part of a city needs to be developed, who should get into a college, and in the case of a crime, what should be the sentence. It is not super intelligence of robots that is the threat to life as we know it, but machines taking over thousands decisions that are critical to us and deciding social outcomes.
Locally known as Rampal power project, a joint venture between India and Bangladesh, it has created tremendous resentment in the affected areas. In a chat with Nidheesh J. Villatt, Professor Muhammad says the project will destroy the Sundarbans. He says Indian and Bangladeshi big business would make a huge profit at the cost of the camaraderie between the people of two countries.
"For over a decade, Modi has not lacked for comparators. He's been likened to Nero, Hitler, Putin. To me, he has all the makings of a Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: a hi-tech populist holding together a fragile coalition of big business, impatient urban youth and religious fundamentalists. Those disparate groups can be kept together as long as growth comes. But if it doesn't, Modi and his generals will go hunting for an enemy: Pakistan, India's own minorities, and the pseudo-seculars."
by Niharika Mandhana WSJ 2 Jan, 2014 In Delhi's Dec. 4 state polls: -AAP 28 seats -Bharatiya Janata Party 31 seats -congress p 8 seats (of 70 allinall) “The common man dared to enter politics because politics in this country failed,” Arvind Kejriwal, AAP’s founder and Delhi’s new chief minister, said in the assembly on Thursday. “Very basic demands of the people were not met in the 65 years since independence.” In national polls, AAP, popular among urban middle-class voters, is likely to chip away at the support base of the opposition BJP, AAP’s leaders then had to prove that they could form a legitimate government. The party, which was created in 2012 out of India’s anti-corruption movement, sailed through its first legislative test with support from the Congress party, which has eight seats.
AAP changes political chemistry in an election year (AAP has now declared that it will contest the national elections due to take place in April-May) Opinion by Saba Naqvi, aljazeera 15.1.14: ...one may have expected more enthusiasm from the left: Since the liberalisation of the economy, AAP has been the first influential force to actually unsettle the politician-business nexus and demand scrutiny. What is happening instead, is that commentators are demanding to know AAP's stance on issues like Kashmir and national security, both areas on which mainstream parties have to tread carefully. Because AAP is the creation of an activist like Kejriwal, there is an expectation that he will take a position on every issue. But within AAP there is an argument that realpolitik demands ambiguity on some issues. The party says it wants to occupy the middle and appeal to a cross section of opinion.
by G Pramod Kumar Nov 16, 2012 Indian media has been full of Aung San Suu Kyi for the last two days with the headlines playing up the regret element - that she was saddened by India’s support to the junta, but never felt betrayed.
With the Lok Sabha elections just weeks away, a Leftist Opinion: "Who are the AAP voters who would otherwise vote for the BJP? By definition, they are people who wouldn’t mind having a prime minister who presided over a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat (whether or not they know what role he played in it). This is where the AAP and BJP constituencies overlap. But these voters are fickle. AAP issued just one statement during its election campaign about the violence in Muzaffarnagar, and apparently that was enough to make the overwhelming majority of Jats, who constitute a strong voting bloc in outer Delhi constituencies, decide to support the BJP. In other words, the more AAP makes anti-communal statements or takes left-wing positions, the less it is a threat to the BJP."
Founded by Siddharth Jonathan, engineering graduate of SVCE Chennai in 2005 and Vijay Krishnan, graduate of IIT Mumbai and student of SBOA, Infoaxe.com acts like a personal web-search engine archiving the personal web-usage of a user such that it throws up more accurate relevant results. Yes, the striking similarities between Infoaxe.com, the recently launched personal search engine and Internet super-power Google are many; there is one striking difference however, unlike the American / Russian origins of Google’s founders; both Infoaxe’s founders hail from India.
"11th May 1998 was the day the Government of India, constituted of a motley crowd of about two dozen political parties led by the “Hindu” nationalist BJP, carried out, as per its official declaration, three nuclear explosions as a deliberate act of milita
The six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has invited India to attend an international conference on Afghanistan to be held in Moscow on March 27, according to a report by local daily the Asian Age on Saturday. SCO secretary-general Bolat Nur
The Canadian High Commissioner to India acknowledged that while Canadian investment into India over the last ten years was USD 239m according to official statistics, the actual figure, including money routed through the tax havens, was more like USD 10bn,