Sri Lanka: Ethnic conflict or Regional Power Play?

The island nation of Sri Lanka, named at some point in history after the mythical place of the Ramayana has been the ground of conflict for thousands of years. Yet from 1983, the discrimination of a majority population, dubbed on the grounds of their language and belief systems as the Sinhalese and the "alleged" northern settlers (who have undoubtedly lived here for longer than published,) the internal civil war has brewed.

The ethnic issues began upon the departing of the British, as communal tensions increased between the largely Southern population of the Sinhalese and the northern population of the Tamil-speaking people.

Sri Lanka has been an ally of the United States of America, for a long time. Interestingly TIME magazine in 2006 has actually called the LTTE an extremely organized fighting unit.

Human Rights Violations that are continuing, with the (largely) Sinhalese-speaking southern population on top, and the (largely) Tamil-speaking northern population subject to arrests even four years after the "claimed" end of the civil-war is shocking. Rajapakse is projected in an image akin to Ravan (of the ancient epic of the Ramayana.) I am appalled by this horror that the ethnic Sinhalese-speaking group believes in a zero-sum war.

How did such a travesty happen? What transpired into such a horrific calamity of human lives and livelihoods? (It is a lot more than an ethnic conflict that panned out ...)

India 2013: Tamil Nadu - Power crisis!

The two main sources of electricity generated in Tamil Nadu are Mettur Hydel Project and thermal plants at the Neyveli Lignite Corporation.

In addition there are multiple thermal power plants of much lower capacity, some operating on diesel, some operating on coal - all of which have little or no indigenous supply of fuel.

Kalpakkam, the first Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR) powers areas in the state capital of Chennai and has already been upgraded close to 1.25 MW peak capacity with an additional reactor. This was designed to be a contingency and research operation to support state capitals in times of grave emergency. Our complete reliance on Kalpakkam for Chennai (and surrounding areas) is already stressing out the production from this plant.

Wind power generation has dropped 85% between 2012 and 2013. This is from 30% of projected peak wind power capacity to 5% of projected wind power plant capacity.

Kudankulam's revised nuclear power technology reactor output is sketchy at best, one can assume that it feeds 500MW (peak: 750MW) of power into the grid if it is operational - despite the fact that it's capacity is much higher. This is more a naval facility than a civilian power production plant, particularly due to its location and is manned by very few civilians.

Read on to see data, alternatives, and where we must try to go from here ...

GimpShop: GIMP taking on Photoshop

Late is the hour when open source answers. There are some of us who'd like to recommend GIMP to those using Adobe Photoshop - behemoth on Operating Systems that get sluggish, the moment you start working on something huge. You can't just uninstall everything, yet GIMP had an alien interface and GIMP for windows was more GIMP, less familiar to the Photoshop community.

It wasn't released yesterday; why this post?

The original Photoshop tools equivalent to GIMP tools have been like the MS Windows 7.x to 8.x upgrade (everything is not where it used to be.) While I have convinced some, who out of brevity did try out, their patience wore thin till they got back to Adobe Photoshop. Being open-source, GIMP needed a few rebuilds, interface-changes, translations, plugin support layers to really get friendly to the Photoshop club. That's exactly what GIMPShop is. 

Read on for screenshots and direct download links ...

Sualeh Keen's Works: Prose, Poetry, Wit and Wisdom

Sualeh Keen's Poetry: A Collection by Sunil Beta Baskar

This is work that's continually growing, being collected at a much slower pace than he manages to pen them. This is just 1 year (almost) - there are 3 more years of notes/poetry/essays/commentaries to be added. I've included more content that was ignored in the previous revisions.

Indian elections 2014: The Future game

Indian Elections: 2014, a few who would change the game among the many ...

India's electorate has always dispensed more power to regional parties thereby enabling coalitions. The regional parties hope to have either a "weak" or reasonably compliant group calling the shots at the center, ensuring that they can have their say.

This would quickly explain how the most complex coalition was headed by H D Deve Gowda and later by I K Gujral who were not perceived to be strong leaders. This does not however grant them authority and therefore explains why they had shorter terms. However perception does not necessarily mean that the leader in question or the party enabling that person with leadership is strong or weak. This however affects electoral mandate.

The second factor is that public awareness toward corruption and scams is growing with an inherent want for 'fair governance'. Hence any party perceived corrupt or having been involved in scams has the negative swing as they call it. (Yet, we must remember that historically - even in terms of evolution, nature itself has never been fair.) Hence having fair governance is as much a pipe dream that might even end up with a global Orwelian Dystopia.

India needs:

• Stability in the Center to help growth in terms of economy.
• Regional stability to avoid unrest, rise in issues like naxalites, requests to form new-states of regions that were not previously union-territories.

You can read further, on the possible political future of India from 2014-2027, hoping that a worldwide war or catastrophe does not happen.