Today, Nation seems to have become one. Whether it is a road side vendor or a big business man or a house-wife or a student or a teacher everyone is talking and discussing only one issue and that is petrol, diesel and gas cylinder price hike. Such a steep hike has not been noticed in recent times.

Is the government justified or not is not the only question. The question that is very important is how does a common man meet his daily needs. Most of the decision taking people and high ups are not bothered as most of them get petrol as perks. But the increase in petrol/diesel prices translates into hike in prices of all commodities as the movement of goods is mainly through road transport. In fact the rising prices today remind me of a muslim king who believed in not allowing the common man to have any surplus money. He said that public should have enough money for a meal so that the moment they finish one meal they start thinking of how to manage the next. Is it that our government is to follow suit.

Yes! It is a compulsion with the government but then why don’t they cut down on unlimited free petrol, free electricity and free rail travel and free phone calls. Why are all these taxing measures only for the people already reeling under the oppressing price hike in essential commodities.

Other measures that should have been taken care of can be like improving the Public Transport System so that a common man has something to turn to. Just sitting in glass houses and ordering definitely lead to chaos and a general unrest.

Recently Nation has suffered a loss of crores because of Gujjar’s protest while the Chief Minister was throwing pamphlets, which many involved people may not read, from a helicopter using precious petrol bought by the Government. Why no check on this?
But we can thank the Government for one thing and that is bringing the Nation together positively or negatively.

There they were, piled up one atop another, Chinese-made rice makers selling for $70 each. Beside them, sleek DVD players. Across the well-stocked electronics store were computers and televisions and other household appliances that President Raúl Castro recently decreed ought to be made available to average Cubans, or at least those who could afford them.

Since finally succeeding his ailing 81-year-old brother, Fidel, in February, Mr. Castro, 76, who appeared before hundreds of thousands of Cubans at a May Day rally on Thursday here in the capital, has been busy with a flurry of changes. In the last eight weeks he has also opened access to cellphones, lifted the ban on Cubans using tourist hotels and granted farmers the right to manage unused land for profit.

More is on the horizon, government officials say, like easing restrictions on traveling abroad and the possibility of allowing Cubans to buy and sell their own cars, and perhaps even their homes. Each of these changes may be microscopic in contrast to the outsize problems facing Cuba. But taken together, they are shaking up this stoic, time-warped place.

Just how far Mr. Castro will be willing to tinker with the country his brother left him and what, if anything, he is using as his playbook nobody knows for sure. Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to reinvigorate the ailing Soviet system led to its collapse and its abandonment of Cuba. More inspiring is the mix of consumerism and pragmatic authoritarian politics that energized growth and reinforced Communist Party rule in China and Vietnam.

China is now Cuba’s second largest trading partner, and Vietnam is one of the first countries that Mr. Castro has said he will visit. Leaders from both countries visited over the last year and had sessions with both Castro brothers. Cuba analysts say that Raúl Castro, as the longtime defense minister, has maintained close ties to both countries’ militaries and has close aides who know the countries well.

“This is the Asia model,” said Robert Pastor, a professor of international relations at American University. “Still, the signals he has sent are so faint and so tentative that it’s not at all clear where he wants to take Cuba or where Cuba will go.”

Marifeli Pérez-Stable, vice president for democratic governance at the Inter-American Dialogue, said: “He’s never going to say. I’m not sure he even knows it. But he is following China, and even more so Vietnam,” meaning that Mr. Castro was hewing to a more go-slow approach.

As in those countries, economic freedom is one thing, and political liberty something else. On the latter, Cuba’s government has given every sign that it is intent on holding the line.

But Mr. Castro’s early tinkering has already laid bare an uncomfortable, and potentially destabilizing, reality in a country that for 50 years has been run as one of the world’s most rigid socialist systems: that some Cubans are far better off than others, whether because of remittances from relatives abroad, ties to the ruling class or unauthorized money-making ventures on the side.

For now, his government seems willing to accept those disparities, tolerating the notion of class differences while continuing to cling to a Cuban vision of socialism that includes food subsidies, free education and health care for all, Mr. Castro’s backers in the government say.

Whether that approach will satisfy Cubans, who are quickly becoming more aware of their relative consumer deprivation, is another question. A rice maker alone costs more than three times the average monthly state salary here. Conversations on the street, away from the lines of people buying what is newly available to them, reveal discontent.

Javier, a 25-year-old computer programmer, has made up his mind to leave Cuba for California as soon as he can. “Come on, these changes are only in favor of a very tiny part of the population,” he said, sitting along a coastal wall and staring into the ocean. “We, who get up early in the morning to get the bus, we, who have sacrificed ourselves, we can’t afford all this,” he added. “I’d love to go to a fancy hotel with my girlfriend for a night or two. But, hey, I simply can’t. I couldn’t afford it, even in my dreams.”

Even for those who can, it is a journey into another world that was all but off limits just weeks ago. The other day, a young woman struggled for 20 minutes to get into a Havana hotel room, jamming her key card in the slot haphazardly and shoving the door with all her might. She could be excused, though, since it was her first time using such a contraption. In her case, her foreign boyfriend paid the $175-a-night bill.

“Different classes have always existed but they are more visible now,” explained María Ileana Faguaga, a Havana-based anthropologist who specializes in Cuba’s struggling black population. “Now you just look at who has a cellphone.”

A taxi driver barreling along the seaside Malecón, who like most Cuban workers is paid by the state, pulled out a Nokia from his pocket this week. “This one has a camera and Bluetooth,” he said, boasting that he was one of the first in line when Mr. Castro recently ended the restrictions.

“What do you think of the Sony Ericsson?” the driver asked, explaining that he was thinking of an upgrade at some point. He was full of questions. Is it true Motorola is struggling? Would the iPhone work in Cuba?

Mr. Castro’s model, what the state-run newspaper has called “more perfect socialism,” appears to be a Cuba with a greater correlation between the work one puts in and the resulting reward.

One of Mr. Castro’s most far-reaching moves may be his announcement giving farmers the right to manage unused land for profit. Cuba spent $1.4 billion importing food last year and, as a result of rising food prices, will spend $1.9 billion this year to get 20 percent less food, which officials call an untenable situation.

Scrapping the longstanding practice of dictating planting decisions from Havana, the government will allow more local control, officials say, and hopefully home-grown food.

But what about nonfarmers? Would Mr. Castro be willing to expand on his older brother’s experiment allowing some private restaurants and rooming houses to operate? What about permitting private auto mechanics, hairdressers and tutors, all of whom exist in Cuba but on the sly?

Washington has dismissed the measures as falling far short of the kind of structural changes needed in Cuba. “I see it as somewhat sad that after 49 years of shortages and suffering and repression people are now allowed to buy a rice cooker,” said Carlos Gutierrez, the secretary of commerce, whose family fled Havana in 1960 when he was 6. “Our read is that these are tactical moves designed to buy some time.”

When it comes to truly loosening the political elite’s grip on power, in fact, Mr. Castro has not ceded much ground. He has encouraged Cubans to come forward with their critiques of the way things are functioning, although he insists that the proper way to do so is through Communist Party channels.

When a group of women whose relatives had been jailed held a demonstration outside Mr. Castro’s office recently, a team of stern-faced female officers showed up to haul the so-called ladies in white away.

“When difficulties are greater, more order and discipline will be required,” Mr. Castro told party leaders recently, announcing that he would convene the first party congress in a dozen years in the last half of 2009. “For that, it is vital to strengthen institutions.”

Mr. Castro commuted the death sentences for an undetermined number of prisoners this week, although the move was dismissed as a half measure by activists who want an end to persecutions of people who speak out against the government.

“Things are changing but everything is continuing the same,” said Elizardo Sánchez, an activist whose Cuban Human Rights and National Reconciliation Commission sees little substantive difference between the hard-line governments of the two Castro brothers.

Even if Mr. Castro aims to imitate Chinese-style reforms, there is no guarantee he will succeed. In the early days of China’s move away from strict socialist central planning, Deng Xiaoping dismantled Mao’s cult of personality, allowing a measure of political relaxation that signaled a shift in official attitudes.

“Is it possible for Raúl Castro to move beyond the cult of personality of his brother Fidel, who is in the same league with Mao?” asked Michael Green, a former Bush administration Asia specialist who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Cuba could turn out to be more like North Korea, Mr. Green said, which undertook market-oriented reforms in 2002 that brought little change in the grim conditions there.

There is still plenty of anxiety in Cuba as well. One woman who gave her name only as Iris bought a Nokia phone with the help of her Italian boyfriend but now has no money to buy cards for airtime. When she does, she feels guilty that the money could go to feeding her son. What she wants even more than any consumer item is a well-paying job that would allow her to afford them, she said.

There must be something in the air; mere days after Sonoro’s luxury CD clock-radio went on sale in the US, Vita Audio have announced their own hand-crafted all-in-one audiophile music system. The R4 is being described as “a traditional music player for the 21st century”, complete with walnut veneer or white piano lacquer finish, and comprises a CD player, DAB radio, iPod dock and USB port. It also has Vita’s unusual remote control “rotodial”.

The rotodial normally sits in a niche on the top of the R4, but can be removed and used as a remote control for while you’re sipping brandy by the fireplace. Sound is via a 2.1 speaker setup, with 80W of power overall. The DAB radio picks up digital signals in the UK, and there’s FM with RDS as a backup. The CD player can handle normal discs or MP3/WMA discs.

As for iPod support, everything since the iPod Mini and 4G iPod range has a place in the R4’s dock, including the iPhone when in airplane mode. With both USB - which can play media files stored on memory sticks - and auxiliary inputs, there’s plenty of flexibility for a lifestyle system too. Then again, considering the price you’d expect it: the Vita Audio R4 will ship in the UK in June, priced at £500 ($974) for the walnut and £550 ($1,071) for the white lacquer version.

[via Shiny Shiny]

Comments:-

Listening to music has come a long way since a decade ago and modern music instruments are a must possess thing for the younger lot. On the surface, the features and the price look attractive. However, the presentation lacks quality as there is neither a proper headline nor a formal beginning. The language is very faulty as the punctuation marks are missing or wrongly placed. The images given are not pleasing to the eyes. They are wrongly placed and lack any kind of uniformity. The music system in question seems to possess all the features of an iPod / MP3 player plus FM. But the real test is the acceptability of the product which depends on its performance that will be known only when it comes to the market. So, better wait till it is actually used by people and their opinion is available before making a buying decision.

The earliest occupation the man adopted was agriculture. A small number of people inhabiting together formed a village. The industrialization attracted people from villages to places where kings and/or their staff were located which were known as towns/cities, because they found more money and other attractions and luxuries of life there at.

Gradually with the multiplying population the towns swelled tremendously with people. They became more and more attractive as centers of fashion. The towns also became seats of learning as many institutions of higher education were established there which were essential for advancement in stature and power and the added attraction being availability of luxuries of life which were absent in villages. The towns/cities have been carved out of villages where people are still living in poverty, illiteracy looms over them and they are backward in social life. The people living in towns face a lot of pollution and suffer from diseases caused by tension.

Why not merge the villages and towns/cities? There can be farming activity as well as industrial activity simultaneously; the educational institutions can be spread at different places. This is possible with modern means of communication and various fast modes of transport.

Such a step would have the advantage of reducing the burden of population in towns. The villagers without migrating can participate in industrial activities hitherto carried out only in towns and improve their incomes and life styles. People living in towns can also improve their health by enjoying the openness of villages. The mingling of villages and towns will benefit the nation largely because with the improvement of living standard of villagers there will be poverty elimination and people will have better health. All the people will be living in large farm houses, there will be equality among people and social life will also undergo a big change. Such a thing can happen only by a revolution - say Rural Revolution. Let us hope that this dream comes true.

Image Credit: Sulekha

Another advantage of tapping solar energy would be that we can check warming of the atmosphere to some extent as the heat generated in generating power by artificial machinery can be curtailed. Also, there will be considerable control on pollution if we start running our vehicles on solar energy and abundant saving in foreign exchange by reducing our oil imports. Health benefits come as a bonus.

Further, by tapping the sun’s energy and using it towards consumption and generation of power, the major problem of global warming can be controlled to a great extent and mother earth can be saved from destruction caused by ultra violet rays of the sun.

Now, suppose, we do not appreciate, the consequences may be somewhat as revealed by the following story:-
One afternoon a man came home from work to find total mayhem in his house. His children were outside in their night dress playing in the mud. The doors of his house and car were open. Entering the inner side of the house he found the TV was blaring loudly a cartoon channel and the family room was strewn with toys and various items of clothing. In the kitchen dishes filled the sink, breakfast food was spilled on the counter, dog food was spilled on the floor, a broken glass lay under the table, and a small pile of sand was spread by the back door. He quickly headed up the stairs stepping over the toys and piles of clothes, looking for his wife. He was worried she may be ill or something had happened. He found her lounging in the bedroom comforted in her pajamas reading a novel. He looked at her bewildered and asked “what happened here today”. She smiled and answered, “Everyday when you come home from work and put questions like what in the world did I do today? Well, today I didn’t do it”.

Consequences of not appreciating: A chaos.

‘Programming’ makes it difficult to appreciate our life. Sincere praise multiplies good fortune and joy. When capable people are commended and supported, their strength and ability grows. So, let’s learn to appreciate.