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POPSReal nature of indian budget revealed "There is no move to use valid tools like raising duties to halt a process that is literally killing Indian farmers. Import duty on cotton remains at a low 10 per cent. Indeed, the lowering of other duties in many cases will hit other sectors of Indian agriculture too. Not just cotton. If this is a pro-farmer budget, it's scary to think of what an anti-farmer one would look like. As always, the standards of judging the deal given to poor Indians differ totally from those used to measure what a `sulking India Inc.,' gets. The big boys shouldn't be too disheartened, though. Business as usual will resume after a pause for the Uttar Pradesh elections." Ridiculous attitude of the media towards the budget and the budget itself has been exposed. P. Sainath is rather insightful.
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POPSFarmer suicides: minorities too? This is strange. When we conducted a study of the region in october, it was very clear that the tribals and muslims were not among those committing suicides. we had not checked up on the dalits and backward classes though; the understanding was that most of them were farm labour, and farmer suicides was a problem of the landowners.
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POPSChina reports on Indian Farmer Suicides Highlights both the significant gap between farmers in india and those in other countries- and the complicity of government sources and scientists in the current crisis. Death toll: 147 in the first two months. The agriculture authorities blamed the low yield of cotton to spurious Bt cotton seeds but Tiwari said there has been few spurious cotton seed in the market since U.S. bio-agriculture giant Monsanto lowered the price from 1,780 rupees (39.56 U.S. dollars) per bag to 750 rupees (16.67 U.S. dollars). Other factors that worsen the situation are reducing price of cotton in the market and competition from cheaper cotton imported from the United States. The cotton price dropped by 60 percent since 1995 but the U.S. subsidies to its 25,000 cotton farmers reached 3.9 billion dollars in 2001-02, doubling over that in 1992.
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POPSSemper Augustus: Tulip! What a gorgeous flower, and what a crazy story to go with it. Sometimes with shit like this you are almost encouraged to believe the world can be just...
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POPSChildren and Violence: Favelas of Brazil "Poverty, the institutionalization of drug factions, and the lack of access to the traditional work market is common to everyone who lives in the favela." Dowdney states. "Adolescents, particularly, are attracted to the social ascension and the status achieved by working with a drug gang." Dowdney adds, "Peer groups and family members, especially mothers, contribute to reasons why youths choose to get involved or not." It would be terrible of me to suggest that this is a parallel universe. But I often picture myself in situations like these... I'd be dead in no time. i'd be the yellow boy of the favela. and this is just one of the many regions in the world that are seeing this kind of violence. i just saw richard attenborough's gandhi... its an ok film, mostly uncritical... but if only the world had the courage this man had.
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POPSRobert Capa War Photography My God. What a crazy picture. "At the time of death". There's this quote on the website: If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough. The bugger staged the photograph. And a bunch of other photographs.
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POPSHelmut Newton Dark underbelly of fashion, went on to explore stridently sexual themes. am dying to get into his work of course. the photo is a very interesting comment on voyeurism... so much for stating the obvious.
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POPSWorld Press Photo Award 2007 Decent article on the photograph, and interesting photograph itself. Should've heard what they were saying on CNN- talking about composition and colour- felt a little eerie talking about that when all the photos showed was devastation etc. Also, he had no time to compose the picture. he noticed the red convertible out of the corner of his eye and bang!
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POPSJoe Hisaishi Some great mood music; he's mastered the non-intrusive music that adds to atmosphere without foregrounding itself, except when the scene is full of blue-sky-silence
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POPSMath Behind Ancient Islamic Tile Patterns Decoded When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. See the full research article as published in Science . It's a wonderful example of original, multidisciplinary academic research bridging history and mathematics that happens to force us to re-think the sophistication of ancient geometrical knowledge. When Lu looked at photographs of Islamic buildings, he found that he could break the patterns on their surfaces up into the same shapes, even though the shapes often weren't immediately visible. "I couldn't sleep for days," he said. "I skipped Christmas break to work on it."
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