Recently I came across this article by Shaffi Mather

As informed by Shaffi, every year people pay around 3 trillion USD in the form of bribes – which is, believe it or not equivalent to Indian’s GDP.

In India corruption is prevalent and common people abide by it as they want their work done. It is observed mostly in all the organizations and departments where one has to avail common services for example city municipal corporation, passport office, electricity department, telecommunication department, income tax, admission in schools and colleges, post office et all. Well, I have been through this numerous occasions and I know that even if me and my family didn’t want to pay bribe but corrupt officers didn’t leave any option. Eventually we have paid bribes under the table to get the work done.

A very good example of corruption in India was exemplified in this movie – Well Done Abba

In this movie Shyam Benegal has shown how much bribe a common man pays to construct one Well in his farm. It has been shown very subtly how he has to pay bribe to everyone in the ladder to get his Well constructed and that’s what actually happens in many departments in India.

As Shaffi pointed out there are number of ways that we can fight this corruption and I have jotted down few which can help to back foot corrupt officers -

1) Use Right to Information act wherever you feel someone is not providing enough information and asking for bribe.
2) Video tape or take a picture of the officer and warn him/her that if he/she does not perform his/her duty you will go public with this information.
3) Use Audio Recording which will serve as a hard evidence of the conversation where corrupt officer is shamelessly asking for bribe.
4) Use peer pressure against corrupt officer.

I am thinking that following can also be done to further this cause -
A web based application should be created where users can enter all the details about the case ( incidence of officer asking bribe to provide a service which is either free or on top of the prescribed fee) This will be categorized on the basis of country, city and department. This will enable to obtain the statistics of a particular country, city and department where all the corrupt officers have asked for the bribe for providing the service.

This can be later used to complain against the person and department to the higher authority. Also this can be used to get justice to the people, bring the identities of corrupt officers in public and eventually help to eradicate corruption. For this to work higher authorities should work on impartial basis and again if they don’t then post data about them as well. Further above four methods can be used to provide evidence of corruption in this web application. With the latest UID project in the offing this kind of system will be very useful to fight corruption at the grass root level.  This kind of application will help us to fight corruption and it will be a genuine effort on our part to make our country prosper in the coming decades.

I know it won’t be a very easy task but it will be one in the right direction which will help to make this world a better place to live.

The partnership of Google and DFL IPL is a first major step to broadcast this big event live on the world stage. This will help propagate cricket to different parts of the world (specially non – cricket playing countries) and increase its popularity.

Youtube will broadcast all the 60 games live.  It will broadcast these games with 5 minutes delay but honestly this hardly matters and no one cares.

Last year’s IPL champions – Deccan Chargers ( a team representing Hyderabad ) will try to defend the title. It will be amazing contest between 8 teams contending for the championship.

Cricket lovers mark you calender with the fixtures and tomorrow’s inaugural match is between Charges and Knight Riders.

I am supporting Mumbai Indians this season and my wife is with Royal Challengers.

Go Mumbai Indians!!

[Update]: This streaming is not available for US viewers. What a bummer!!!

Tech Mahindra will buy31% stake in Satyam by paying $351.4 M approximately (1757 Crores INR). The transition procedure will be long and it will happen gradually. Tech Mahindra and Satyam Computers together will be a good competition to Indian/Major World IT Consulting Companies. They will be in same league as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Accenture, IBM etc.

Tech Mahindra’s stock soared during trading at BSE.

This move is a good one for Satyam as a company but as usual with merger and acquisition there will be shredding in some division and removal of redundant positions at executive levels.

Her brilliant piece of work is now available online – Sita Sings The Blues and details about this animated movie can be found here

This movie is about her – and she has shown this movie through the medium of Ramayana (Epic Indian Mythological story about Lord Rama) – by seeing Ramayana from Sita’s (Lord Rama’s wife). Nina has resembled her life with Sita using amazing colorful animation and smooth songs. She has blended the commentary by three Indians and animation style for event visualization in a completely innovative way. She has put good amount of effort (approximately 5 years) to study Ramayana and come out with this beautiful piece of art. It’s a very brave attempt to correlating her life with Sita and she has used her imagination very subtely.

This movie is very englighting and amusing and throws a completely different perspective to Ramayana and it is very informative for people new to Indian culture or trying to know the Indian culture. (I would suggest to see other version of Ramayana which is equally entertaining and delightful.)