It took me almost six weeks to complete this esoterica (if such word exists) but I am still not very sure what I am trying to say.
The Fox History series ‘International Terrorism since 1949’ with its punch-line ‘Know terror to fight terror’ is really nice one. Although I always fear the history they put forward is somewhat US biased, but truth even though one sided is still truth, its upto us to look at the other side of the coin.
Take the example of Nasir and his support to PLO, in some movies on Fox History like Sadat, his portrait is quite dark but the episodes like ‘The Greats’ praises his leadership and vision for modern Egypt.
The point of confusion for me is the thin line between freedom fighter and a terrorist. How to differentiate both?
Today morning I was watching this episode about Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Cuba.
Although what these guys did in Cuba is always inspirational to me and maybe many people in the world, the program seemed to be United States propaganda to sketch him as ‘terrorist who became president of a nation and survived for 60 odd years’. It is USA’s open and dark secret that the bulk of terrorism, today the world is fighting against, is the descendent of US policies and their intelligence agencies.
But for now, let me explore my confusion in more detail and with some crude examples. Prabhakaran and his Tamil Tigers, who were they? Terrorist who killed thousands or Freedom fighters who betted their lives for their Tamil nation? Terrorist in Kashmir, Khalistanis, Irish Republican Army, PLO and many similar? My patriotic mind easily categorizes Tamil Tigers, Kashmir separatist and Khalistanis as terrorist, but on the similar lines if somebody from England thinks that Bhagat Singh and Hindustan Socialist Republican Association as terrorist is he/she wrong?
I don’t know if I am being hypocrite or what but let me put it simple; fighting for our soil, nation and people is a right given by our destiny and the same applies to others. In the fight against unjust powers if we forget this for a single moment and deny this right to others, we may cross the boundary between freedom fighting and terrorism. Well, that’s where Bhagat Singh and Prabhakaran differed, even though both used violence as a mean to achieve liberty, one was never involved in bloodshed of innocent British men and the other never spared a single man, woman or a child who raised voice against him.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Your honor
Last week, for the first time in my life I stood in the courtroom before CJ of family court. (I filed my petition for divorce there) Unlike my expectations and imagination about legal profession the environment over there was really sick. It will really give major attack of nervousness if anybody spends a week in atmosphere like that. I was fascinated by this profession since I was working with Spectrum (Once I even thought of studying law).
The three years at Spectrum were some of the great days in my life. My career was just kicking off then. My earlier job was in Oracle/D2K. I always dreamt my career in C++, so when the opportunity to work with Spectrum came I just grabbed it without a second thought. For the first few days I was just wondering why my boss was bombarding me every now and then with every small-big tasks when there were 20 other experienced programmers around. A week later I realized, I with a just passed-out were the only programmers there and the other guys were either data entry operators or Lawyers.
So I started with Spectrum as junior programmer. It was fairly easy for me, as my boss and his bosses really showed trust in me (It might be that they didn’t had much choice either) to climb up the ladder of promotions as the team gradually grew up. We used to work for days and nights dreaming that one day Jurix will become major share holder in legal information retrieval market. We used to have long and brainstorming discussion about search and retrieval algorithms, database design and so on. Most of us were fresher or less than one year experienced, so everybody was trying to put things together which he/she learnt during academics. We never had any formal training about any language/technology, but we were so full of enthusiasm and energy that we managed some Herculean tasks without knowing what we were upto. (My first COM server was sheer product of my understanding of pure virtual functions, the words like interface, inproc server etc were not even in my dictionary then) The side effect was that we were never contented with the end product as by the time we were close to deliver it, somebody or the other used to discover much better technique to do so.
One of my bosses used to call us bunch of masons, who never had any plan, schedule or even an idea about the deliverable. He used to blame us that we start putting bricks and cement if somebody asked us to build home, without even understanding how many rooms there should be. Today when I can see myself surrounded by so many smart architects, I wonder if anybody of them has ever built a single room out of his knowledge. Most of these smart architects do the maintenance of old houses or put extra storey to the building which probably was product of some enthusiastic masonry. :)
The three years at Spectrum were some of the great days in my life. My career was just kicking off then. My earlier job was in Oracle/D2K. I always dreamt my career in C++, so when the opportunity to work with Spectrum came I just grabbed it without a second thought. For the first few days I was just wondering why my boss was bombarding me every now and then with every small-big tasks when there were 20 other experienced programmers around. A week later I realized, I with a just passed-out were the only programmers there and the other guys were either data entry operators or Lawyers.
So I started with Spectrum as junior programmer. It was fairly easy for me, as my boss and his bosses really showed trust in me (It might be that they didn’t had much choice either) to climb up the ladder of promotions as the team gradually grew up. We used to work for days and nights dreaming that one day Jurix will become major share holder in legal information retrieval market. We used to have long and brainstorming discussion about search and retrieval algorithms, database design and so on. Most of us were fresher or less than one year experienced, so everybody was trying to put things together which he/she learnt during academics. We never had any formal training about any language/technology, but we were so full of enthusiasm and energy that we managed some Herculean tasks without knowing what we were upto. (My first COM server was sheer product of my understanding of pure virtual functions, the words like interface, inproc server etc were not even in my dictionary then) The side effect was that we were never contented with the end product as by the time we were close to deliver it, somebody or the other used to discover much better technique to do so.
One of my bosses used to call us bunch of masons, who never had any plan, schedule or even an idea about the deliverable. He used to blame us that we start putting bricks and cement if somebody asked us to build home, without even understanding how many rooms there should be. Today when I can see myself surrounded by so many smart architects, I wonder if anybody of them has ever built a single room out of his knowledge. Most of these smart architects do the maintenance of old houses or put extra storey to the building which probably was product of some enthusiastic masonry. :)
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